Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life

Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Josh whiteskin Josh whiteskin is a former child prodigy who began playing the game of chess at 6 years old and by time he Was 16 years old had become a national champion many times over as well as an International Champion in fact he achieved the level of international Master which is one of the highest levels of achievement in the game

of chess for anyone of any age his early life achievements were the topic and focus of the book and movie Searching for Bobby fiser he then quit playing the game of chess and moved on to martial arts the study of philosophy at Columbia University in New York and eventually foiling which is essentially surfing over the water Josh is not only a high performer he has now become perhaps the most sought-after professional coach in the domains of Finance in the domains of creative Endeavors professional sports and Military today's episode is one of my favorite hubman Lab

podcast episodes ever I know as a podcast host you're not supposed to say that but it's absolutely true because not only is Josh whiteskin So highly accomplished but he is an exceptional teacher of the learning process he took what he learned in chess and about learning chess and applied that to martial arts to foiling Etc and from participating in all those Endeavors he was able to distill out the Essential Elements of learning and how to tailor one's learning process to one's own unique personality and style flaws and tendency to make mistakes and how to leverage

all of that in order to Be able to learn better in fact throughout today's episode I promise that you will constantly be reflecting on where you experience things like tension and fear both in your personal life your professional life your educational life whatever it is that you're trying to learn and pursue in life today's conversation thanks to Josh will allow you to look at that understand it better and know where to apply work when to relax when to push Forward and in effect how to become a better learner both of yourself and whatever it is

that you happen to be pursuing in life we have a saying in science which is that sometimes you encounter somebody who is truly n of one meaning a sample size of one in a category all by themselves Joshua skin is truly an N of one I know of no other person like him or even close to him in terms of his ability to live a unique life path and to take what he learns and To put it out into the world so That Others May benefit he lives with a tremendous amount of intentionality for the

people he loves for the things he loves and with the intention of helping others learn how to learn better I must say it was a true honor to sit down with Josh I've been a huge fan of his work for a very long time you'll also learn that he he's a really nice person before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and Research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the

general public in keeping with that theme this podcast episode does include sponsors and now for my discussion with Josh whiteskin Josh whiteskin welcome thank you man great to be here feel like I've known you a long time because I saw the search for Bobby Fischer and I learned about the real human that was About you and I read the art of learning and I must say I'm a fan and somewhat obsessed with the uniqueness of your Arc and the choices you've made and your understanding of learning as a process and its Universal properties it's specific

properties in different contexts so I'm excited to dive in I think for people that perhaps are not familiar with you maybe you could just give us a broad overview of your backstory like the things that you've Really focused on in kind of chunks if you will um just for a couple of minutes so that people can get familiar with the incredible things you've done and I think that reflects the uniqueness of your choic making process which then we'll get into yeah sure well thank you man it's an honor I appreciate what you said um yeah

so I started playing chess I grew up in New York City downtown Manhattan I started playing chess when I was 6 years old and and I I discovered Chess walking through Washington Square Park with my mom and I remember watching a day or two and then at one point I broke away from her I was going to play on monkey bars and I ran over and I asked an old man if I could play and he said yes and my mom was surprised and we started playing I played my first game of chess and it

I remember the very distinct feeling of it was as if I was dis discovering or rediscovering a lost m Memory it wasn't like I was learning something new it was like I was wiping away the dust or the cobwebs between something between me and something I had known very deeply at one point very strange feeling for a six-year-old boy and then I just fell in love with the game I got really intensely into it my first teachers were the hustlers in Washington Square so it was just like a rockus crowd of guys who took me

under their wings started teaching me the Tactical Street side of the game and um I was just unhindered as a learner which is interesting from my perspective now as a dad because I my my little boy Charlie is is taking on surfing with that same kind of Freedom just that liberated uncomplicated out of his own way kind of vibe yeah and then by the time I was seven I started competing and then I was a top rated player for my age in the country from my from most of the years from age 7 to 23

my whole chess Career so it was a very strange upbringing in some ways which has led to some quirky elements in my psychology which was that I was living in a pressure cooker of competition from age six on and my whole childhood was spent was spent as the Target and so like if you're if you're competing in national championships and you know I would compete in in youth National and World Championships then otherwise I'd be competing against adults everything Else but then you're the target so any mistake you make and kids make mistakes all the

time we all do my rivals and their coaches who are strong Masters and international Masters and Grandmasters would be able to study and adult strong players can see very easily the weaknesses in a child and so they would be prepared for them so if I didn't take on a weakness it would be exploited and I would experience pain and so from a very young age not taking on my Weaknesses became outside of was outside of my conceptual scheme which is a really interesting thing to grow up with and it's in many ways like lay the

foundation for um a lot of what I've done since and there are lots of things about that upbringing which could be unhealthy I being in the public eye very bizarre luckily it was before social media yeah super yeah I and I have never been on social media in any way which has been a choice yes so when I was 11 The the book searching for Robbie fer came out and when I was 15 the movie came out and at that point I was you know completely in love with chess it was my first love I

was an unobstructed learner I was loved competition a lot of my opponents were trying to control the game memorize openings figure out how to win by force but I love the battle my style was to create chaos like like in Washington Square Park um find hidden harmonies and chaos and I love that so As the game went on and they moved away from their opening preparation and controlling things we moved into my power Zone which was the fight I love the fight and then a my chest life in many ways was was free flowing and

then the movie came out when I was 15 and then you can imagine what that was like as as a you know a young teenager all the attention the media cameras everywhere groupies all the Temptations and I didn't ask for it and it was a Really it was an alienating period for me relative to chest and around the same time I started training with a Russian chess trainer who started urging me to move away from my self-expression as a chess player and to study the the players who were the opposite of me I was a

attacking player aggressive I played kind of in the style not at the level but in the style of like Bobby fiser or Gary Kasparov or M tall world champions who were like hot Blooded and I was being urged to study the more cold-blooded prophylactic side of chest petan carpov more conservative defensive players so I was being told instead of saying like what what does Josh feel here what would karpov play here who's the opposite of me and so the combination of that public eye and then the movement away from my self-expression led to a period

of obstructed and self-consciousness and what an interesting theme we could talk About at one point is that passage from a preconscious to a postcon competitor in many ways I went from like that freedom of preconscious competition into the tunnel of existential crisis and um and I grappled with it for over a lot of years and when I was 18 when I graduated high school I and and during that grappling I was still the top rated player in the country I was winning the national championships every year so like from the outside it looked good but

From the inside I was in turmoil I was fighting with myself I had all these demons and then I left the US I spent a number of years after high school studying East Asian philosophy meditating reflecting um and then my study of Chess in those years and I was deeply in love with chess still it became much more of of an introspective process it became I was competing as intensely as ever but chess became connected to life and then when I was 19 Years old I started training at the human performance Institute at the time

it was called LGE um lir grapple and eter and eberry it was a um it was a performance training cross disciplinary Performance Training Center that Jim Lair opened up and now then it became the hbi later on and it I never forget the moment that I was I was working with these performance psychologists and I was and I was at gym and I was working with nutritionists and I was on I was doing this intense workout I looked next to me and there was Jim Harbaugh who was the head coach at the time of the

who was the um quarterback of the time of of the Cults NFL team and we got into this amazing dialogue about performance and it was a real eye- openening moment for me because I realized that we spoke the same language I like holy this guy's a he's an NFL quarterback and I'm this crazy chess player but we're doing The same thing and it was this crystallization moment where I realized that all of these Arts are fundamentally connected at the highest levels and what we're doing is much more similar like if you're at the like I

observe that people who are at the Pinnacles of different Arts are often doing things that are much more similar than people who are in the same art from them but at lower levels there's something in that Qualitative experience and then then I began studying the principles that connected these things and then then I had this interesting experience I'm going to I'm kind of compressing a life into a minute or two but I um in my early 20s when I I I ultimately moved away from chess and I'm happy to talk about why and that journey

and then I I moved into the martial arts the my study of East Asian philosophy moved me Into the study of DSM and taii and then into the into into um taii Push Hands and I had this really interesting experience where at that point I'd been the introspective process of studying chess had become much more about studying life and so I was dis I was I was in an exploration of interconnectedness but I was I was not playing chess anymore and I was all in on the martial arts but I was giving a simultaneous chess

exhibition which I Did every year for many years for Duan distri research and I was playing 50 chess games at once and I was walking around this this big Square playing against 50 you know young upand cominging strong players at the same time and I realized at one point like I wasn't playing chess I was moving chess pieces but I was thinking in taii language I was you know feeling flow feeling space left behind riding energetic waves of the game And it was like I was winning all these chess games but I hadn't played chess

in a long time and I wasn't playing chess and and and it became like and then my study of taichi became extremely accelerated and then I started winning competing and then I won in the fighting application and I started winning national championships and then and then I began to think about like like or become more and more deeply involved in the study and the exploration of Thematic interconnectedness which has really become a life's work um and then my martial arts life ended up and you know and Tak me all over the world and won some

World Championships and I moved into Brazilian jiu-jitsu and um trained in that art for many years and um was training for the world championship for Brazilian jiu-jitsu this is after winning um worlds in the in the TA Chi Chuan and I broke my back in in a training camp I own a school with Marcelo Garcia who's a dear friend who's nine-time world champion perhaps the greatest Grappler pound-for-pound to ever live and I was training at a really high level and I um and I was thinking about this like I was getting ready to run begin

my surge toward black belt World Championships in Jiu-Jitsu and I ruptured my L 405 disc and um and it was the first time I'd been moved away from an art not on my own Terms and it was a um it was you know brutal injury then I ended up as we do when we're mad men you know coming back and training for a year and a half on with the broken the busted up back and then the doctors told me I had to I had to let this one go um or I'd be crippled for

life and around that period is where I started to go all in on the art of training others and I said okay if I can't be all in training as a competitor as an athlete myself I I've been train I've been training Elite competitors in mental and physical performance for some time then but I wanted to take on the challenge of loving training others with the same intensity that I love training myself and I I I went all in on on that art and I'm still all in on that art but I never actually got

to the place where I love not being in the the arena myself as much as being in the arena myself and and then in this chapter of my life now I I I fall in love with the ocean arts Initially surfing and now foiling and for the last um eight years I've been living in the jungles of Costa Rica with my family um and I train three to five hours a day uh in foiling and so I've I'm in my my you know really intense training lifestyle myself and and I train Elite mental and physical

competitors around the world in um in in Finance in science technology and in sports I've been doing some amazing work with the Boston Celtics for the last few Years um so that's a nut the journey in a nutshell happy to dig into any of it I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors wealth front I've been using wealthfront for my savings and my investing for nearly a decade and I absolutely love it every January I set new goals for the year and one of my goals for 2025 is to focus

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20 to claim the offer with a 100-day risk-free trial free shipping and free returns you can experience this gamechanging cookware with zero risk yeah thank you we'll definitely revisit um certain time points and themes there I can imagine as a young boy playing chess you you have your own strategies you're um developing an understanding of What works for you but of course you as a young kid are also getting into the mind of the other player you actually described that your your coach or coaches were encouraging you to get into a different mindset one that

was not your default or trained up mindset less focused on chaos and aggression um uh and more in this uh this other mode of playing by thinking about these other types of of chess players and and ways to play Chess so I can imagine that you know most kids are not weaned they brain isn't developing around a game right it seems that your brain was built the the developmental neuroplasticity that's so robust in early childhood was built around this game that we call chess and it seems to me that you were were encouraged to develop

a theory of mind that wasn't just your own which is itself I think is really uh unique right I mean most six seven 8 nine 10 12 year Olds might be told Hey listen you know the reason they were mean to you at school is like they just hate themselves or you know I they they just didn't think about whether or not to pick you you know first or last for the game or whatever it is right you know that you get told to do that but for you it became a seems an intense practice

of trying to learn to get into the mind of another while holding on to your own sense of what's you versus them and And so as a developmental neurobiologist I understand this is like perhaps one of the most important events in our the development of our brain seems that your brain was built up around that Dynamic and so now you coach Peak performers and so much of coaching and teaching or being a parent is to get into the mind of another the difference is when you're a parent you can think back to being a child

and at least get some general sense of what that's like stepping back From what I just said and I realized that there's a lot of uh words there but do you think that what you're doing when you approach a practice like taii or Brazilian jiu-jitsu or science or math or music from the perspective of of a performer or a teacher is that you're getting into the mind of someone else you're getting it you're trying to or you're trying to stay in your own Mindset I'm sorry I'm not being more succinct with this but I think

you know as humans we do this like I'm sure our dogs look up at us and say oh like they they're happy with me or they're sad with me or but but they're you know the algorithms they're running are more simplistic I we we as um the most sophisticated Old World primates do this so spectacularly well and it seems that much of your career in your life has been built around these kinds of Dynamics so put simply what is your mindset when you approach a practice that's just you in the practice versus your mindset when

you approach your practice when it's you and another a competitor versus when you're trying to teach something you and a bunch of different minds but there's a common goal okay so there's really three big questions wrapped in there and now there's sort of like 15 really big questions really big questions and my Audience gets upset at the at the the length of these questions but I think for me it's important to just kind of set this out there as a buffet from which you can select anything or discard anything that you like there are some

many delectable things to select there yeah so I mean first of all one-on-one competition is so interesting in in in mental and physical Arenas so if we think about Brazilian jiu-jitsu or chess as two of them but let's Zone in on Chess because that's when I was a kid you you you're thinking about what your plan is and you're also thinking about what your opponent's plan is and you have to every move your opponent makes you have to think why did he do that what's his plan what what what is his what is his tactical

land what is his strategic plan shortterm and long term so you're trying to unpack his strategy always and you're assuming that he had or she has a strategy well if they don't Have a strategy then they're not going to be a good chess player and so then very quickly if you're if you're evolving in that art you're only playing against people who are at your level or better if you're growing if you're always playing down then you're not improving and there's a beautiful filtration process in like the people who accelerate in their growth curve in

the Chess World are ones who are challenging themselves all the time Playing up pushing their limits and so like I spent my life against you know playing as strong players and um and I always I always played a little up except for when I was in Youth competition I always played up which was important for me and so people had a plan and they had and they were very deceptive about their plans and they their layers to the plans there's like there's the tactics they're trying to set up there's their long-term strategy But then there's

what they want me to think their strategy is which it isn't and in fact their strategy is to be Mis to be have misdirection around what their strategy and their tactics are and they layers to it and it can go many many layers deep same thing in the martial arts right so obviously you need to have a theory of mind to play that game at least the way I played chess at a high level because you you're con and there's this very Interesting shared Consciousness between players like you and I are sitting a little further

apart than we would sit if we were playing chess so if we were like half the distance we are from one another and we're just sitting for 6 hours with like a three- foot chess board at 3 feet between us studying this thing our minds become connected MH we often will share the same illusion we'll you might see something and then I see it when you see it if we have this same Um we might have the same blind spot we might have the same Insight the the connectedness of mind is fascinating and it's through

chess it's directly like energetic it it's through eye contact it's through body language it's by seeing micro Expressions it's everything so you're always reading the opponent and as you get really good you learn like what your tells are what your opponent's tails are then you also learn like I often would have tells on purpose And I'd have predictable tails that I would let people lean on for a long time until I didn't let them lean on it anymore it's like in the martial arts where you you know you you you give someone comfort in a

lean right and you give them a rep of something they can lean on here they can lean here then they can lean here very comfortably five or six or eight or 10 times in a row until they can then they're on the floor right so you're this is happening in Chest it's happening in all of these things and one-on-one competition is a Relentless truth teller you know if you have a weakness it will be exposed if your opponent has a weakness you will expose it if you go into a chess game and you've got huge

opening repertoire that's extremely complex but there's like one little place that I just hope he doesn't go there he always goes there it's so Bonkers you can't hope your opponent's not going to see it you can't Make the second best move because maybe he'll blunder and I'll win that never works if you're playing as real competition and so like you need to understand your mind you need to understand your opponent's mind you need to understand your opponent's understanding of your mind right that's a lot of plates to spin and what I guess what I said

before not so clear clearly um is that for a young mind to be able to learn to spin all those plates is Incredible it's clearly possible it's Unique but it's possible you did that but it takes a young mind or an adult mind out of its own unique experience so this is eventually how we'll Circle back to preconsciousness versus postc Consciousness um but in the meantime um when was it that you first recall thinking not oh I'm gonna beat this guy but sensing you know he's getting nervous or he's confident or he can sense that

I'm nervous or I'm going To set a trap and just you know feeling out you know whether or not they detect the Trap I mean that it's just a lot right away when I was I mean I us to keep in mind my my my first teachers were Hustlers were chess hustlers in Washington Square so they would they would mess with my mind all the time and then they would teach me what they were doing and they would do it again at a higher level right so you're distracting they're distracting they're setting Traps they're using

Jedi Mind Tricks of every sort they didn't kid gloves you at all I wouldn't say at all I mean this was a rough and tumble crowd you know there were a lot of drugs in the park there was a lot of like you know fights in the park I mean they these guys took me under their wing I mean there were moments where like some guy would be going off and the guy was like hey Josh is here you know cut that out like they I was their prote so they did they they Did but

they also you know did not wear thick gloves and they the th gloves were thinning out all the time and I was getting better fast then we go to war um they were my teachers they were my friends um I'm super grateful for like they and then and then what's interesting is that my first classical chess teacher Bruce pendini saw me playing in the park and asked my father if I could work with him and then we started training together and um one of The things that that um I feel really badly about is the

way he was portrayed in the film Searching for Bobby fer because Bruce is still a dear friend of mine he's Ben Kingsley played him as a as a a much more severe person than he was he he was a beautiful teacher and he really he wanted me to express myself as did the guys in the park but he was also filling in the holes and teaching me a classical chess foundation and we were studying chess from the endgame first Principles studying positions of reduced complexity to touch high level principles and then learn to apply them

to more and more complex positions so my early chess education had both the classical study with Bruce and it had the street smart game with the hustlers at the park and and But to answer your question right away when I was six years old like my my opponents would would mess with my mind and trap me and trick me and make me Think here and then they go there and then I would learn to do that and then I remember there was one like youth competition where I made a move in had a trap went

oh I mean it was like that obvious right it's like the worst like and then it gets increasingly subtle right but like and my opponent said oh he's unhappy took the pawn then you and then your opponent see it and then you learn you know those things keep on the circles get smaller and smaller and Tighter and Tighter and more and more refined this is the opposite of Asbergers or Autism by the way what you're describing as a a hypertrophied set of circuits for theory of mind in a very young kid so to be able

to understand what's happening around you and I think for many people the joys of childhood are really about not being aware of what's going on around you uh the psychologist would refer to uh the know this is like um a lack of Impingement impingement is when like a kid is playing and they're really enjoying something and then suddenly they decide they they don't want to play anymore and the and the parent doesn't want to be bothered so they say no no no no like keep playing you know they're like impinging on the kids reflexive desire

to do something or not do something this isn't about keeping them safe this is in the domain of safety but um at least within the channel of Chess Seems that you developed your entire understanding of the psychology of human beings except for of course you had a experience at home of of family and friends but chess certainly um cut a wide trough through uh through your your development well I'm really grateful for my early chess life and I also would never choose to put that on my children I mean I it worked out really well

for me I mean I'm I'm I have my wounds right I mean there's lots of Things that I've had to Grapple with um but I think if you put a lot of children through the pressures that I that I went through it wouldn't work out well and I watched a lot of my young I mean almost all my young rivals or I mean like very close to all of my young Rivals ended up quitting and falling into crisis and and um you know then you you have parents and coaches who are expressing their own egoic

needs through the children and the children are shouldering that and then That becomes very difficult to deal with and then um you're dealing with heartbreak and you're putting your everything on the line and you're losing and you're dealing with your own self-doubts and the the Heartbreak of your mother and your father and your coach and then your friends and I mean there are so many and then as the pressures get more and more intense in chess like you really are putting your heart and soul in the line through that Chess board in in casual games

let alone in in National and World Championships and you're being shattered when you lose I was shattered many times over I mean I lost last rounds of National Chess championships and World Championships multiple times over and I had and those were the greatest moments of my life in retrospect they taught me the most important lessons of my life I would never take it back it's been and that's a pattern in my chess life and my Fight life and everything I've gone through um the most heartbreaking devastating moments ultimately were the ones that catalyzed the most

growth and they were beautiful um and I really relate to them that way but they also can be brutal for young minds and they can destroy people yeah what do you think it is about um failure or missing the mark in some way that catalyzes change I mean I always say that you know your brain has no Reason to change if you're just in trying to learn something and you're in flow you're getting you know most people associate being quote unquote in flow with getting everything correct doing everything correctly um I don't think that was

the original definition the cheeks some high intended but um the Neuroscience of brain plasticity tells us that it's only under conditions in which there's some mismatch between what you're trying to do like even you know Like this has been studied in terms of reaching for an object and there's a mirror displacement or a prism displacement or something you eventually can learn to error correct um because the cup is actually over there as opposed to where you see it um but it is the deployment of these chemicals inside of us adrenaline noradrenaline and dopamine in particular

those three their cousins the catac colomines that tells the at a neurochemical level tells the Synapses wait something needs to change I mean the brain doesn't have any reason to change unless there's frustration agitation or at least some neurochemical change associated with those things that we call frustration and agitation so do you think these big what feel like cat cataclysmic fails set a like a sort of window of plasticity in which we can change I often think that that it's only through like the devastation of a huge loss that The brain is now set up

for a bunch of new learning certainly we wouldn't want to design the system that way but as I always joke you know I wasn't consulted at the design phase and you weren't either we just had to work with what's there yeah like big failure why why do you think that sets a wavefront of of change yeah it's it's a great it's a great question Um well I think I think the the study you sent me yesterday speaks to this yeah maybe we should talk about that yeah yeah maybe I'll answer that question experientially maybe you

could then talk about the study and we can Riff on a little bit this is so much fun by the way because I've lived my life in in the arena just like pushing myself like I'm My Own I'm not a scientist but I'm like my own laboratory you said to me yesterday at the game like you said I'm not a scientist but I'm looking forward to tomorrow and I said trust me you're a scientist yeah you know I I do science through the lens of a certain understanding of mechanism and structure function and uh some

processes and you do science through the through the lens of experience and uh drawing core parallels and principles in different domains and at different levels of uh from unskilled all the way Up to virtuosity that's kind of how I see it I think the way that I like if I think about the most painful losses of my life the most devastating injuries of my life I think about dying drowning I drowned on the bottom of doing hypoxic breath work in a pool on the bottom of the pool four half minutes after that it was you

led to the arguably the mo the best decision of my life to move into the jungle um I think about the losing the last round of the under 18 World Chess Championship on the first board um that's a very interesting story I could describe a little bit or I think about like my first national championship I lost when I was I was um seven eight first board last round just unobstructed learning until then and then I lost the last round of the on the on the um you know for the title F into an opening

trap like that's the loss that was the greatest thing that ever happened to me you were how old I think I just turned eight or may I was late seven and like that was it it was because if I had won that game I would I I easily could have Associated winning with just no pain no heart just just cruising up into the end that was the moment that like I got my ass kicked I had to go back you know deal with these demons come back train for the next year and then I won

the next year and then it was Off to the Races I my life might look very different if I'd won that game That and actually the kid who beat me in that game David Arnette became two years later we became best friends and for all of our childhood we were on the same chess team and best friends and I think he gave me the greatest gift of my competitive Life by kicking my ass that game the most devastating loss of my chess life was was so I was 17 years old I was competing in the

world under 18 Chess Championship in SE Hungary um every so every year there's an Under 12 14 16 18 21 world championship and I was always representing the US in those tournaments around the world and you know I you know travel to India or Brazil or Hungary or Germany or somewhere and compete in the world championship and under 18 worlds I played the tournament I just was playing very inspired chess I had just picked up um on the road three weeks before Jack kowak I had become I was just on fire With kowak vision and

I was just so like appreciating life with this freshness and intensity than I'd ever had more than I'd ever had I was I was like totally on fire in chess in life in love in everything and I I was paired against Peter Sidler who was the Russian we were on the on the first board last round we were we come you know we were playing for the world championship every country sends their National Champion so it's a long Tournament to get there um early in the game I think it was move 12 he offered me

a draw so if ID accepted the draw offer um it would have gone the tie breaks I didn't know exactly what was happening but I thought that he was slightly favored in tie breaks I wasn't sure but basically the world championship would be determined or the gold medal would be determined by how our opponents in previous rounds did in the last round But I had a but I I hadn't calculated it out before but I had a feeling it it it was like maybe it was like 40 60 or 3070 against me but I it

was my style I never accept a draw off first that wasn't my St I always wanted to fight so I declined pushed for a win now the beauty of his decision was also he offered me a draw in the critical position where I had to make a very specific decision which is a trick that chess players play on one another which Is that like if you're we should talk about tension at one point it's a it's a really beautiful theme to explore in different sports so one thing that happens in chess games is that you

have this building tension between mines and often the tension on the chessboard and the tension on the mines are mounting together and the urge the need to release psychological tension often leads to the decision to release chest tension in the chest chest pieces and When you release chess tension usually the person who releases the tension will be on the wrong side of tactics so a lot of chess the chess game is about putting mental pressure on the opponent to force them to break the tension on the chess board so in that game he offered me

a draw so you think about it we're 17 years old we're 10 days into a world championship battle we even no matter how much we Love the battle some piece of ourselves wants a way out like we want to release the tension right it's just Elemental to who we are when we're living with that much pressure so all I have to do then is like accept the draw shake hands and the tournament's over and then it's out of our hands what happens so in that moment I have to also make a critical chest position so

the the urge to release the tension is subtly entering into my chess decision and in that move I declined the draw and I made a slightly over aggressive move which turned and he ended up um playing a beautiful game big attack beating me I lose to the world championship just like this close to like your dream and you're shattered right um I then went and hitchhiked across Eastern Europe to meet my girlfriend at the time in a little town in Slovenia and let and we broke up and all then I ended up meeting again at

a street corner in Brazil the world under 21 Championship 3 weeks later lots of drama you know being a 17-year-old kid I didn't study that chess loss for two and a half months it was so painful to me I always studied games immediately afterwards and I always you might study a chess game for anywhere between three and 15 hours studying one chess game and that's that say 10 hours is focused on the two or three critical positions of the game and this was Before chess computers were ramp into a chess engines that could always just

tell you the answer to um the move that's also something we should talk about later how chess engines and AI chess engines change the nature of who chess players are because you can have the answer right away versus having to sit in cognitive and emotional distance for sometimes weeks or months at a time without knowing the answer but we'll come back to that maybe so I didn't Study that loss for two and a half months because it was so painful to me then I was my family spent a lot of time at se um which

was an interesting part of my my life and my chest life living on a little boat catching our own food doing our own engine work um and I was I was at C after competing in both of those World Championships and some other things and I sat down to study that game and I spent you know dozen Plus hours studying That one critical position of the game and then I realized what the like the move I should have made was outside of my conceptual scheme in that critical position I wasn't ready to make that the

move I had to make and he was also I think a slightly stronger chess player than me I was a great fighter I I love the battle but I think if objectively he was a better his name is Peter schidler he ended up becoming a world- class Grandmaster and is and is just an Incredible chess player today at the time he was just amazingly brilliant um beautiful fluid mind but I was confident going into the game so I had to make this move that would essentially be his attack was on the king's side my expansion

was on the queen side I had to remove my final defensive peace from in front of my king away from my King's side which is super counterintuitive because you think you wanted to defend your king what I didn't Realize is like harnessing the power of empty space against aggression his attack needed my defense like fire needs fuel to burn moving my last defense of piece his attack couldn't break through but that principle was something I didn't understand at all and so it's not like I I would have found that move um but it was was

a real pop in my mind right so then I was 17 18 years old then a year later I started studying taii start Stting DST meditation DST philosophy the daing Chang laa the inner chapters um and then I get in taii I start moving meditation I start in taii Chan Push Hands without making the connection Push Hands is the martial art which is the ESS which is like the essence of Push Hands is learning to utilize empty space against aggression but I hadn't connected it to that moment then you fast forward to 2004 World Championship

which is what the art of learning ended With the final chapter of that is the world championship finals I'm playing I'm fighting this guy bigger than me stronger than me he's been training since childhood um final fight in a big Stadium everyone wanting me to be destroyed in the biggest fight of my life and I won that fight by harnessing the power of empty space by letting him feel my weakness by leaning on him by letting him by let and then I just and Then disappearing so it's it's very interesting how there was no mental

proc there's no conscious processing of that connection but the biggest loss of my chess life and then the principle which I wasn't ready to understand yet was how I won the World Championship in the martial arts so many years later and it's a completely different discipline right so it's an example of like and of course that principle is Manifest in every part of my life today But like that's one of many stories in my life where like a law Spurs an Insight which might consciously or often unconsciously lead to something incredible down the road and

I think that one of the biggest challenges that we have but so interesting that the loss of a World Chess Championship final is leads to the win direct lesson ISS the win of a world championship in in a fighting realm and how common that is and one of The things that I I think about like when you when you sit down with great competitors again and again when you hear their inner Journey the the most heartbreaking losses lead to the transformational change which leads to the biggest wins of their life um whether it's in basketball

whether it's in in fighting whether it's in business it's in finance it's in it's in in writing love in oh in love oh my God In Love yeah I mean breakups are Devastating they're they're a death of sorts yeah I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 ag1 is is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens ag1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs and it tastes great now I've been drinking ag1 since 2012 and I started doing that at a time when my budget

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off I Have a friend who's a um trauma therapist addiction expert and you know occasionally you'll hear these tragedies of uh typically it's young guys who uh the girlfriend breaks up with them and they commit suicide and for years he would work with families of these people these these young guys and he finally connected the dots and he realized that in every case it was as if there was no future whatsoever because it was their first Relationship and it it when you hear it you just go oh it makes so much sense but you know

the 16-year-old 18-year-old brain however old these kids were it's it's devastating I I want to make sure that I ask about Devastation because you you said that you were devastated you experienced a tremendous amount of pain from these losses in particular the one that you just described if you don't mind I'd like to ask you about what that was like um I don't want to spin off Into a discussion about the the science of grief but I did an episode about grief and it was really surprising to learn that most of what you hear about

in pop culture that you know there are these uh very specific stages of grief and you progress through them linearly none of that is true all of modern research says that it's not disbelief anger acceptance It's like a hodg podge of different emotions Depending on time of day and middle of the night and but The core feature and I find this so interesting is that grief whether or not it's what I would consider kind of trivial grief like losing your favorite pen or a watch that you really love okay an object versus somebody extremely close

to you a parent a loved one a child God forbid that the brain systems that map memory onto action are disrupted in grief such that you know you wake up each day and you want to go see the person or call them And so it's a what grief really represents is a remapping of your understanding about what you can do with your physical body to create action and interaction with this person that's now gone and so that the remapping is one of the the nervous system having to do all this no-go we talk in terms

of in action systems and the basil gangly of the brain it's you have go go programs and no-go programs there's some other stuff too but it's mostly go or noo and Basically grief is this taking of a depending on how long and How Deeply you knew the person a tremendous amount of neural real estate and algorithms that were all go you could text them you could call them you could hug them you could kiss them you could listen to them you could smell them and now it's all noo and that we think is what we

experience as as grief now in terms of losing a very important chess match when you talk about being in pain And in grief what was that like was it did that mean sleepless nights disbelief and at what point do you think you were able to say okay you know what I'm going to start thinking about this constructively I'm going to turn this into a go as opposed to just trying to you know get in your time machine and travel back in time which of course is impossible what was what was that early experience of of

Devastation like and and how did it transmute into growth Yeah well even think even sitting with you now thinking about it it seems ridiculous to for a chess game to be losing a chess game to be anywhere near like the absolute heartbreak of losing a loved one um and yet we can make things very large in our minds and in our beings right I think that human I mean one thing I I I think about is how hard we fight to maintain our conceptual schemes our identities even if they're torturing us and loss isn't relative

you Know I mean the fact that we're sitting right now not far from you know hundreds if not th thousands of homes that have been been wiped away doesn't change other losses like we we sometimes will say well at least we're you know I know I have a lot of friends that lost their homes they'll say well at least we have our health we have our things you know okay and then so we can do this but it's but it's um it's not how the human emotions system responds reflexively to Our own losses so I

don't think it's like um dismissive or sociopathic to to experience a big loss in one's life um as a big loss even if it's not the worst possible loss right it's just not how we're wired right and one of the things that I reflect on and that I've cultivated it's very hard um but that I work to cultivate is when you're in those moments of rupture to both be in the rupture and have the perspective that we will have Later about the rupture which is not to say not being in the rupture one of the

things I feel badly about in in like when I wrote the art of learning I spoke a lot about process and outcome and it had a big impact on the Chess World and then what happened is there were generations of parents who were who had young kid chess players who their kids would go to compete and the parents would say it doesn't matter if you win or lose all that matters is the process It doesn't matter if you win or lose and the kids are like putting on their armor to go to battle mental battle

and it chess is intense like when you're playing chess you're putting your mind your body your psyche everything like you on the line and if you lose you feel shattered like that's just how you feel if you're not trying your hardest then we can't we shouldn't even be talking about you so you let's say you you are trying your hardest you're Putting it all on the line it's on the line and you lose and you're shattered like every part of you didn't didn't you you just you feel destroyed so the kids are putting on their

armor to go to battle and the parent tells them it doesn't matter if I win or lose it's deeply confusing and the kids actually usually know that the parents are full of the parents actually care so much and they feel guilty about how much they care about their kids's Result they're telling their kid that to feel less guilty about the fact that they're putting their own egoic needs on their child and it's all like and the kids see it all that's the hilarious thing is an 8 10 11 year old like they see it all

and they're like Mom give me a break and the parents are just stuck in their guilt and absurdity seen this so many times s so like the discussion of process and outcome is so subtle right because yes It's about the process it's about the journey it's about the long-term process but if we don't care about the results the process won't work so we need to put ourselves on the line enough to be shattered and the process is what really matters but it's not that we can liberate ourselves from caring enough to be shattered because then

we're not engaged and it is something about putting our egos on the line that is what leads to the growth surges that Great competitors have the ones who become virtuosas right and so then that stated how can we have experience the simultaneity of being shattered and having the perspective that this is probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me you have to be uh in a mode of theory of mind with yourself about your future self somehow and this is what I think losses are so beneficial for is that if you've had a couple

of Breakups you realize that you can fall in love again if you've only had breakups perhaps you think well it always leads to a breakup but you know that the process of moving forward is the only way to test that hypothesis again right and so I think repeated failure um is essential right because with repeated failure means that there was a also repeated fighting one ways back after failure so yeah I think sometimes Uh not to take us into a different course of story but just very briefly my the first manuscript I ever submitted in

graduate school took forever to get published and it went from the highest of journals down to a good Journal solid Journal but it took forever and that was so beneficial I was crushing at the time but my reward circuitry is built up around very long latency between effort and Final outcome I'm just used to Long Weights between figuring out what's going to happen and uh actually one of the weirdest things about podcasting or social media is that I feel like you go to quote unquote to publication so fast it's like whoa like things used to

projects used to take two years and then you get reviews and then this you know so I think um your early devastating failure or failures because you had a few of them in there at least L more than a few probably set you up for Tremendous frustration in tolerance um and this not just hearing I mean the words this to Shall Pass they're helpful but it that's really something that needs to be experienced in in my view it's a very interesting thing when you're talking about competitors is what is the right balance between like playing

up and playing down right like how much do you want to build the confidence of a young competitor artist or person or any of us Young whatever age and how much do you want to be stretched a little bit beyond your ability so that your weaknesses are exposed you have to take them on and you have to grow and getting that balance right is hugely important and and and it's not simple like a lot of boxing training camps are based around the boxer's confidence being everything and you want them to feel Invincible going into the

ring right and then from another perspective it's something very Powerful about having a training camp that's so intense that all your weaknesses are exposed you have to take them on if you're not sparring against people who can expose your weaknesses then you don't know what they are and you don't have the chance to grow right I mean I I I live at this point with a trying to be at Max stretch um pre without snapping right like for example if if I look at my foiling like if I'm not Falling enough during a a foil

session that I'm not pushing my turns hard enough um and if I'm yeah if you're just if you're just succeeding all the time then you're not pushing yourself enough do you believe in optimal uh levels of arousal for different aspects of practice or game um autonomic arousal is something that I've worked on for many years and and one of the most impressive features I think of our brains as humans first would be our ability to think into The past present or future or combination of those two if other animals do that they don't do it

nearly as well and they certainly don't um create Technologies to bridge those different time scales that's number one but the other one is our Visual and um temporal aperture of focus so when we are in a state of elevated arousal our visual aperture shrinks I'm sure you're familiar with this and we slice time More finely much you know it's like a higher frame rate right which is why people who for instance see a a devastating traumatic car crash report seeing experiencing things in slow motion right because their frame rate is high like a slow motion

video um whereas when we are relaxed our frame rate is lar larger bins of time and I feel like so much of the discussion around things like flow and um uh optimal States for learning have to do With assuming that there's one optimal state of arousal but I feel like in every Endeavor I've ever been involved in an um it's about learning the transitions between the arousal states that allows us to you know pull back a little bit as things as you said like get tense just relax just a little bit to be able to

maybe see see a different perspective or ratchet up our level of of tension or AKA arousal in order to be able to F slice the the you know the Micro expressions of a competitor yeah um I mean this these two cameras on the fronts of our skull and the rest of our brain are really devoted to this process of of you know shrinking or expanding the aperture of our Consciousness and it could be talked about in terms of space just Vision like tunnel vision versus panoramic Vision yep can be talked about it SpaceTime you know

tunnel vision fine slice panoramic Vision broader slice but then when you start getting Into like the then you map that onto the past present and future mapping and that's where I feel like we're into the game of of uh skill learning and chess and strategy so forgive me for the kind of you know top Contour Neuroscience discri but that's how I see the human primate as is so different than all the other creatures in the world that's that's how we're different because uh we can learn chess or ballet foil you know Gibbons Are pretty amazing

at what Gibbons do but if they're trying to learn other stuff that they've been failing so far I spent a lot of time um playing with frame rates and I had this experience that I wrote about that slowing down Time chapter of the art of learning where I when I had these experience both in in chess and in fighting but it was one time I was I was fighting in a against a super heavyweight dude in a competition And my hand shattered and like I I broke my hand right here and it was it was

it was interesting because the fight was was very intense reasonably hard and my hand broke and instantly time slowed down and he was he was moving in slow motion and I was able to just so easily play with someone with with like a broken hand compared to what had been a war before we know what that is right we do know adrenaline adrenaline yeah adrenaline and that and That tunnel vision and then the frames are fat are so if I inject you with just a little bit of adrenaline it it stays in your periphery but

it activates systems in your brain in parallel to that and um you're going to experience an immediate dilation of your pupil your you'll have more tunnel vision I mean every process is sped up in the direction of higher frame rate so then the question then came for me and this would be fun to talk I've never Spoken to a scientist about this process like how do I learn to do that it will MH right and then how can I train because I can't just pump myself with adrenaline all the time although maybe I or maybe

I can learn to have that physiological deploy it right so then how how can I deploy it right what are triggers for having that chemical change and then also how can I train so that um I have the experience of more frames than my opponent and so Marcelo Garcia Who I he's known as the king of the scramble he spends his whole time in transition so if you're training Jiu-Jitsu with most people they're always finding a position and holding it Marcelo one of the unique things about his training life for most of his life was

that he never held positions he was always moving he was always in the in between and it's true in most Arts is that people think that the art is the positions that they see but the real High level art is the space in between the positions so if you have this position leads to this position that's going to be like there's going to be no frames in between for most people for some people there might be four frames but if I have 100 frames then I can play In Pockets That You Don't See and so

if you're living your life in the training process in the in between in the transition if you're always the way that manifests in Actual like for example Jiu-Jitsu training or submission grappling training is if you're not holding positions you're always moving and you're spending all of your time in the in between while people who are holding position are always static so if you go to a Judicial school and you sit and watch it's interesting to look for this one thing notice the amount of time static versus in motion Marcelo was always in motion there's a

beautiful Clip of him that you got people can look up it's in Suave was an old documentary back in the day like 25 years ago I think it was it's on YouTube it's like an 8 minute clip of him training as an I think an 18-year-old and you watch him just like in the early days of him learning this transitional approach and he's just never stopping he's always allowing the person but you have to get past the egoic Dynamics because you can't like you're you're giving up on Dominating people all the time because when you're

in a dominant position in Jiu-Jitsu you want to hold it cuz you've won and there's all this passing between men who are fighting or women who are fighting each other want to dominate but if you release that and you're think about the learning process then and you stop holding then you're moving and you're getting non-stop exposure to the in between so if you spend your life training in the in Between then you have more frames than other people do that's what a lot of what illusionists are doing right they spend all of their time training

in the spaces that other people don't look at and so it's not magic it's brilliant training it's the art of Illusion at the in between right and a lot of the things that you can do high level martialart artist can do to a lower level martial artist or someone who doesn't train that feels mystical it's all about that Principle manifest an interesting ways but and in general like for me and this goes back to the question you asked two or three brilliant expansive questions ago around um intense moments I a lot of what my training

has been is having some serendipitous intense moment and then learning and that becomes a beacon so for example there was a moment I was playing in a World Chess Championship in Calicut India and I was deep into a calculation couldn't find the solution And there was an earthquake and everything started like in the actual world everything started shaking right but I experienced the earthquake from within inside of the chest position and I knew there was an earthquake but I also was lost my brain was lost in in The Labyrinth and and I found the solution

and then I got up and left vacated because we had to leave the playing Hall and we came back and I made my move and Went on to win and it was so interesting because it was like and then the earthquake like my and a lot of what happens in chess is that you're reaching so deep into the complexity like into the cupboard but the solution is right here at the front and all you have to do is come back out in surface one of the best ways by the way to prevent to to minimize

chest blunders with like talented young players or players of any level any age Is to shift the order of decide make the move and then write it down because you notate your chess games two decide write it down and then make the move the write it down is a resurfacing and you have common sense look at the position almost all chest blunders you realize You' blundered instantly you can think for 20 minutes make your move you know instantly you blundered because there's not that surfacing right but then you can learn To just do the surfacing

before making the actual move it's true with human decision- making in general right we realize that the scrub right as we yeah complete it yeah because like we're we're caught up in all of our we make the move and then we've left our thought process and like oh that was just absurd right and we we see it and mean you think about I mean you think about the the heartbreaking literature you know studies and in how people who Have jumped off a bridge relate to it the moment after they've jumped off the bridge those who

have survived right the interviews afterwards yeah they report wishing they hadn't jumped right immediately like they jump and then they wish they hadn't jumped such an important message you we hear all this stuff about suicide prevention and you know but just that knowledge I mean I don't know how conscious of that sort of thing people are as they're headed down The the trench I mean what um of of suicidal depression but um these apertures that we're talking about these time space apertures where frame rate is set and visual aperture is set I think for most

people um we experience them as uh sort of notches so it's like you know you're in a high state of arousal and you have high frame rate you know and then um and just like being like a ball bearing down in a trench you can't really see out the other sides you're Literally in there at a certain frame rate of let's say an argument an intense argument with somebody where you want to win and you're frustrated with them and the whole situation and you're in the trench the um whereas when you're relaxed it's more you

know a broad concave or a flat table where the ball bearing can move around at at will if um it sounds like Marcelo and people that train um these different transition States as you're really um learning to Access the uh the different frame rates but from a place of like kind of like a little dimple in a um in a table and then being able to move to the next one as a dimple and kind of moving from from Dimple to Dimple as opposed to like these trenches of of brain States and I think that

um I think about this a lot a lot because I feel like most bad decisions are made from a high frame rate high arousal State most of the terrible things that humans have done to One another you know I suppose their sociopathy and like you know PR pre-planned things but it tends to they tend to be associated with with high arousal States where people regret what they did all second deegree murder for instance yeah um in any event I think the ability to move through these different arousal States at will is possible uh you asked

earlier like how would one do that well the beautiful Thing about the visual system in these different frame rates and states of arousal is that it works in both directions so when you're in a higher state of arousal your visual aperture shrinks you go to a higher frame rate but it's also true that if you shrink your visual aperture you go to a higher frame rate the converse is also true if you deliberately for instance as we're looking across one another right now if I start to take in the fullness of the Picture here the

walls Etc there's a natural relaxation of the autonomic arousal system so parasympathetic activity goes up and what's incredible is that anytime we view a horizon that naturally happens because you're not setting to a single fixation point so anytime you see a horizon you relax and it's not a coincidence so the the visual system can drive it Inward and your autonomic rousel can drive it toward your your uh visual system the Other thing is there's a really beautiful paper that came out about two years ago would show that people who do a bio feedback game where

they're watching a little you know it's like a more kind of like a sine wave and they're deliberately trying to increase their level of arousal as the as the curve goes up for those that are just listening within a few days they can learn to control their pupil size which sets their arousal and their aperture For a segmenting time so you can learn this through bio feedback and I think that the script for that is available online I haven't tried it yet but have you ever heard of these yogis that could control their pupil sizes

even independently of one another that's amazing because the it's not supposed to be able to occur but they but you can so you can learn to you know I guess the poor men's version of this would be look in the mirror stare at yourself and try And ramp up your level of autonomic RS and watch your pupils get bigger and then try and relax yourself and make them smaller that practice it seems in biof feedback allows people to do it without staring into the mirror so to speak so it can be done it's just that

it hasn't been parsed by science that finely until recently it's interesting I I um so I have this term I use called firew Walking which for me what it means is is cultivating the ability To learn from from experiences one doesn't have with the same somatic intensity that one learns from really intense experiences that we have so for example let's just say you're a jiu-jitsu fighter and you overextend your arm and you're in a world championship and you get your arm broken or your shoulder ripped off or something so you've lost the world championship and

you got a shattered arm you're not going to overextend your arm that way Again you've learned that that lesson is burned in but like if you're watching a ji- Jitsu fight and someone overs arm gets armar and then Taps out you it it's very very different experience how can we cultivate the ability to study other people's like worst most heartbreaking blunders worst moment Etc and learn from that with the same somatic intensity that they learned from it right so much of that is physiological so I've I spent a lot of Time doing bio feedback and

a lot of time doing visualization practices and doing very intense visualization practices and a lot many many years working with triggers for my own Psychology and Physiology in so that I can get my physiology primed to have an intense learning experience while studying something that might otherwise just feel intellectual and then combining that with my own experience of things and it's it's it's such a I mean If we can we can 100x or THX or 10,000 x our learning curve by being able to learn from other things with the same intensity that we can learn

from our own things but people don't harness that why do you think they they don't is it just it takes time and it doesn't seem as in um intuitive as going out and shooting free throws or something like the I think people are are really amazingly unreflective about the training process the I I I told you like I'm I'm working I I haven't written a book since the art of learning and I'm I'm a couple years into this beautiful process of of writing um my next book which is going to be called I think the

art of training which is really what I've been cultivating for the last decades and um and I'm deconstructing my you know my approach to training in mental and physical disciplines and it's it's interesting to go through that process myself like what have I what do I do What have I done and what have I helped others do um I I and it's it's a interesting like the art of learning kind of was a birthing process that's what it felt like to me I I I took notes to it for five years and then after 2004

worlds I wrote it in nine months it just kind of came out of me and I'm kind of in that process now with this so it feels really organic and intrinsic the creative process and I I I don't know it's very interesting when you talk to People who were really playing at Elite levels of different fields or who are just below like full self-expression or like they're they're just in the edge of virtuosity but not quite there and you start to deconstruct what they do there's so much low hanging fruit that they can do why

I I don't know I think in many ways people I mean there's lots of reasons I think of for one thing people who are very um talented in arts don't have to be so deliberate about Their training often to reach a certain level often people have other people building their training process and they're not reflective about their own training process because they have big teams of coaches who are creating it for them um people haven't cultivated the art of deconstruction um which is an art that's very important people haven't cultivated The Art of Loving training

which is a hugely important like meta skill to Learn um people haven't taken on like all of the skills around physiological triggers around P changing one's physiological State at will people haven't practiced visualization very intensely there all of these like these skills that we can put together in order to train at a world- class level but it takes patience and um creativity and you know not just being subject to what everyone else does but being able to look expansively at Everything I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function I

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and detoxification and worked to reduce my mercury levels comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health and While I've been doing it for years I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive I've been so impressed by function both at the level of ease of use that is getting the tests done as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are that I recently joined their Advisory Board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast if you'd like to try function go to function health.com huberman function currently has a weight list

of over 250,000 people but they're offering Early Access to hubman lab listeners again that that's function health.com huberman to get early access to function we had a guest on this podcast um Jim Hollis uh he 84 year old probably 85y old yian analyst um on and he uh just brilliant guy he's written some really important books um under Saturn Shadow and uh Etc and he said you know so he has a real kind of like suitup show up you know get to work kind of mentality But he also um is a very reflective person and

he said you know if there's one simple key to life it's that one understand that most of our daily lives our waking lives are in stimulus response but that it's so critical to take 10 to 15 minutes each day to just get out of stimulus and response and either to just let stuff geyser up out of our unconscious subconscious mind or to just put some real thought to Something that you know most everybody is stimulus response I I wonder these days with social media and so many things filling the space between walking to the car

or with the you know Pro players that you work with you know I'm guessing the moment they they're on the plane they're on their phones and texting and all these things are wonderful Technologies but they fill all the space with stimulus response yeah they fill all the space with stimulus Response and um you know it's not unless you go to a place with no Wi-Fi accessibility that you suddenly realize like wow wow like in most of Modern Life we're just constantly in this tennis or pingpong match with this trivial thing and that trivial thing and

some of it's essential but that there's no quote unquote space anymore many ways my life is built around creating that space and it it's interesting when I was playing chess I experimented from with studying Chess from everywhere between 45 minutes a day to 16 hours a day to see where the Sweet Spot was and what I came to was about 4 and a half hours a day MH um but that four and a half hours a day was like a 10 out of 10 like just on fire and then the rest of the day became

about cultivating those four and a half hours and my life today has that kind of Rhythm as well and you know training like I've spent many years working with people who are just Brilliant in the investment space has been a really interesting W because it's a great laboratory because people are very driven they want they're all in they're motivated um they'll take themselves on and it's a great place for me to over the last couple decades to to like refine the art of training um because I don't like solving for motivation that's one thing and

I think part of that relates to that quirky Dynamic from when I was seven That I described of always being the Target and so never having like not taking on my weaknesses out was outside of my conceptual scheme and so in many ways I I don't I haven't really had to struggle with motivation myself um for better or worse and I love working with people partnering with people be who are all in who want to take themselves on I don't love having to motivate people and so a great laboratory for me is with people who

who Who have all sorts of problems who might be obstructed but who who are all in and um and like you're working with world-class investors and what you know they're they're grinding themselves out 14 15 16 hours a day doing less is is a huge part of doing much more and then you you you start to see like they might be at like if you think about a 10 out of 10 as being like in terms of like when they're at their very best creatively they could slip from like a 10 to a two and

not even notice um and then you begin to cultivate an awareness of of where one is in one's creative Spectrum right and then you start to cultivate the art of stress and recovery and like amping oneself up and then releasing and you see that the ability to turn it on is directly connected to the ability to turn it off as as you know if you walk into a fight gym and you study a budg of Fighters and the mats one great read you Can make is looking at the the depth of physiological relaxation when the

guys aren't fighting and you'll see who the highest level Fighters are the best guys man they can turn it on with wild intensity but their bodies are so mellow when they're not going and then man like they're so efficient it's so it it that oscillation that range is so huge right but people don't cultivate the art of turning it off in order to learn how to turn it on uh you know I've for for many Many years decades I've been practicing what I call now the miq process most important question process and the essence of

it is it it's what I came to as the most potent way so far that I've found to to train analysts or thinkers in um in in mental Arenas you're you're training people in the art of of what of discovering what matters most if you look at if you talk to like a a great chess player actually looks at less than a lower level chess player but they look In the right direction so you might think a great chess player people often think like oh yeah I can calculate 50 moves deep 100 moves deep it's

all irrelevant move two was was inaccurate so it was just all an illusion the great chess players might look it much less but they're looking in the most potent directions the lower level chess players are lost in a sea of complexity right so if you're working with with like a let's say an a scientist or an investor or Whatever them straining their mind for what is the most important question ideally to begin the practice toward the end of their workday with with like release recovery period with full intensity in a Peak Performance State f stretch

one's mind for what matters most and then release it release the work day completely don't work all night grinding yourself out at a low level release and then first thing in the morning waking up pre- input return one's mind to the Critical question and brainstorm on it it's very powerful because you're opening up the the the you're systematically opening the channel between the conscious and the unconscious mind you're feeding critical questions to the unconscious which is processing overnight and like I know you know all this like the the consistency with which you come up with

an Insight in the morning is incredible interestingly and you'll probably know Why much more than me improved dream recall often happens in simultaneously when one starts to have more and more insights about the miq in the morning which is fascinating then over time you can have Micro manifestations of this throughout the day before going for a workout before taking a walk before taking a break before taking a piss instead of going when you're going to go to the bathroom in the day instead of like Checking your phone while taking a piss you pose yourself in

miq you release it you do not do anything but piss in the bathroom and breathe and then return to the question and you'll have an Insight right so you're you're learning to just oscillate between the conscious and unconscious States and your you're opening up that channel and you're practicing stress and Recovery then your physiological workouts are also stress and Recovery all the time so you're Building that theme in everything that you do and you realize that like when you're at your very best for four or five hours a day you're doing multiples of the work

that you're doing if you're just grinding yourself at you know what I've called in the past a simmering six or whatever at you know for 15 or 16 hours a day and so people can do so much more in less time and my life's my life my lifestyle is based on that you know I'm training very intensely physically And I'm doing really intense mental work and I oscillate between them in beautiful ways and I have a lot of empty space for reflection for meditation for for like zoning my mind on on what matters most it's

it's about quality not quantity but it's so interesting how we live in this in this culture where just quantity is just consuming everyone yeah it's well it's as Hollis said you know the stimulus response thing um dominates and it dominates I think because well I Have several Reflections first of all I I just have to say you're absolutely a scientist you just you just proved it to us um through a description of this process which I might ask you to describe once again yeah um because I think there's so much value in each of the

pieces and how it's put together um three things come to mind um first of all yes indeed as you know and listeners of this podcast uh will know that yet is the it is during Sleep that we reorganize our neural connections and actual neuroplasticity occurs the stimulus is provided in wakefulness and focus and attention and but the actual rewiring occurs during sleep deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep uh one little fun I think but also powerful um tool that I learned from maybe you know him as well I'm blessed to have Rick Rubin as

a very good friend oh yeah Rick and have had beautiful gems Amazing wonderful such a wise I've spending more and more time with with Rick um and but he taught me something extremely valuable which was the process of taking some time to just lie completely still and let your mind go as wild as it needs to or as calm as it needs to while keeping the body completely still this mimics rapid eye movement sleep when we're paralyzed and the mind is very very active and I actually think That um practices such as Yoga Nidra non-sleep

deep rest are are also mimics of rapid eye movement sleep and there are data starting to emerge now that it mimics rapid eye movement sleep but in wakefulness so put simply lying still relaxing the body as much as possible and letting the mind be extremely active um Rick also taught me a little trick for which I don't know any science but it certainly seems to work for me which is that if you uh wake up from a dream And you want to continue having that dream keep your body completely still whereas if you wake up

from a dream and it was a troubling or or anxiety-provoking dream move your body and seems to work extremely well and I'm I I have my theories about why this works um I have to ask about this process of of reflecting on one's own mistakes deliberately kind of addressing one's own pain points or shame points as such a key feature of your your Upbringing and and your practice around learning forgive me for um going a little bit longer here but recently somebody taught me something extremely useful she said you know our Consciousness is sort of

like a like a lighthouse and and we have this beam of light sweeping around 360 degrees but where we have places of Shame about whatever things that were done to us things that we've done whatever just points of Shame things That we don't want people to know about us that we don't even like to think about it's like a stain on that Lighthouse and when that light passes through that stain it casts a a a wedge a shadow in the shape of a wedge and she described it in somewhat mystical terms she said you know

it's through that shadow that evil things enter us and that the world can hurt us and that the process of getting over our shame but also experiencing life in much More fullness and and being able to cultivate our craft and be more present for ourselves than for others is a process of going right up to that Lighthouse window and looking at the stain and going that's what it is and that's the process of wiping it off now that's all you know that that's just a an illustration for us to understand what I think is the

process you're describing which is that you get right up next to your worst nightmares your Worst um mistakes the things you don't want to think about and in doing so you learn to relax in their presence and they sort of disappear as points of Shame yeah it's interesting when I when I wrote the art of learning it was in many ways is cathartic for me because there were parts of my life that that I had felt like I had let myself down like there were there were Parts like like my chess life I I I

moved away from and um like there were Certain moments of it where I felt like I hadn't fully expressed my potential and I just wrote them all I just shared it all and it was it was so beautiful it was so cathartic when I think about leadership I think that it's so important to like leading with vulnerability is such an Exquisite I spent um Joe moula and I spent today a couple days ago with sha McVey who's the head coach of LA Rams who just um just a few days after this big the big loss

Against the Eagles and we had this we actually ended up watching the tape it was his first watching of the tape of this heartbreaking playoff loss he had and um and watching him process it and you know he's such a great leader um both Joe and um um and Sean like lead they both take themselves on more intensely than anything but they lead with vulnerability like they go up against their stains and and like being authentic There as opposed to being a leader or a father or a mother or a coach who just keeps it

in the pocket as if they're perfect there's something so inauthentic about that I think in in in human relationship and in the cultivation of oneself as an artist going right at one's weakness is so powerful now of course there's also the the tender balance of how much we should how much we should cultivate our strengths and how much we Should be spent Shoring up our weaknesses and one of the most important principles which I learned too late in my chess life is that we can take on our weaknesses through the lens of our strengths right

remember this brilliant Sage Russian coach Yori ravv said to me at one point you can learn karpov through Kasparov his point at being you can learn about the great defense defensive chess through the great defense of great aggressors like you as Opposed to just studying kpov and thinking what should I what would karpov do here which was urged to do by other people like learn defense through offense right so it was part of my self-expression I I learned that principle too late for my chest life but it's manifest everywhere else right so while we're cultivating

our strength which I think we should do as a way of life how do we go up against our stains but in ways that we're not fundamentally It's not shame I don't I don't relate to personally like I don't that's a word I don't like shame it's not shame it's like like when it becomes just like a like a breath pattern like we lose we we go we put oursel in the line we lose we go at it we study it we you know we we study how we look we we study about what the

other thing that's incredible to me is that when you study your losses when you go up against what you're calling like that that that that's a beautiful Image like the like where like the shadow of the lighthouse right the the interconnectedness of the technical the psychological and the Thematic is so powerful in the learning process almost every technical mistake that we make in an art if we're pushing ourselves to our limits if we're like if you and I are are like around the same level and we're competing in something where we're about in anything like

any technical mistake I Made will have a psychological Dimension because I most likely my technical weakness was emerged because I was so psychologically pressured that I wasn't able to solve the technical position right or if you if I make a psychological error it's often because I was a little technically out of my water and so it put pressure extra pressure on my psyche that then you were able to exploit right and every technical mistake is local right but There's themes there's like a theme that that houses hundreds of those technical manifestations so if we are

always thinking about the technical the Thematic the psychological and we have what I call a six-dimensional introspective process right and we're looking at all these the interconnectedness of those different parts of of The Human Experience of an art or anything else then the growth curve is is incredibly explosive because We recognize we make a technical mistake and we learn the theme we take on the theme that housed that one but also houses dozens of others and so as we turn that theme into a strength into a power Zone then that technical mistake goes away but

as do the other manifestations of that theme and if we're also studying the psychological weakness that allowed that technical weakness to manifest to like une Earth itself then that psychological Dimension Becomes something we take on and then we're studying thematic interconnectedness as a way of life because then that lesson we learned through that chest that like I I made a subtle chess mistake but that connects to my love life it connects to my fatherhood it connects to my like my foiling my Jiu-Jitsu my everything because it connects to the theme and it connects to my

psychology and and it manifests I don't believe in Compartmentalization I believe in thematic interconnectedness right and like like the the core themes of my life I would say if if I had to boil it down would be love interconnectedness and receptivity I only do what I love and I spend time with people who I love and that's how I live the study of interconnectedness is my way of life in some of the ways I've been describing and receptivity is is What I cultivate every day in my life and the ocean with people with humans um

and but we always get get isolated we get like siloed oh yeah is this chess mistake like one of the things I've I found so confusing is why don't more great chess players who try successfully translate their level from chess to other things because chess is so hard and chess is such a relentlessly truth-telling art if you become a world Class chess player you're good cuz there's no lock in chess as especially if you become very good very young I mean I think this is true of most prodigies I don't want to um name them

but I have a colleague very smart guy I His science is very solid and I remember I met with him and I said Is it true that you're sure's going to love that you refer solid yeah that's okay he's done nice work I I just wouldn't say that it's like transformed our Understanding of like everything in that field but he's made some very important contributions he's a fabulous teacher and a nice person um but he's said I I one day I was meeting with him and I said I I you're a child prodigy I heard

and and he said former child prodigy and I was like okay well here we're getting technical but yeah okay I think we're and I I asked my dad um because he my dad lived um in the same building as Daniel Baron bomb the the musician who If you've ever seen the movie Hillary and Jackie was one of the world's most accomplished uh piano players at a very young age and um and my dad used to hear him playing when he was a kid and like they wouldn't let him play with other kids and he was

like I mean Baron bomb is a Ser for classical musicians and penis in particular it's like serious stuff and I so I asked my dad I was like what's the deal with this child prodigy thing and he said um yeah very few of Them go on to do much in their adult careers in any field right and I was like Wow and um I thought okay so what's missing there is clearly not a lack of ability Focus I mean you could just say raw talent but you still have to kids L to focus so what's

missing is this uh transfer of of understanding um it seems or or what you're talk talking about the interconnectedness of things um and so yeah I probably will get myself in Trouble with this colleague but Hey listen maybe he'll take on something new and and uh do do something addition additionally spectacular uh he's got a lot of things on his plate um but you know that struck me I was like oh you know it's not clear that being a quote unquote child prodigy is such a good thing for the long Arc of one's life but

you have seemed to bring in these other elements uh love I'd like to talk more about that and I would also add at least From an outsider's perspective of um you seem to have broken the mold with like kind of what's expected of you you know based on your prior accomplishments in just speak I have no identity in being a prodigy just to be clear so I don't relate to that word at all I mean words has been put on me from the outside but I have I just don't associate with it I don't relate

to it at all because I I was you know maybe somewhat talented in chess compared to Most people but then very early in my like by the time I was like six and something I was only competing against people who were better than me and kids who were as talented as me and then on the world stage kids who are more talented than me and I couldn't rely on my talent at all because every I mean I I had to work my ass off and I won and I lost and I got my ass kicked

and so for me it was all about the Battle and taking myself on And like I think what happens it's funny many years ago I was giving us a simal and simultaneous chess exhibition and I showed up at this place and all these kids were there and they were all excited to play against me and then the organizer of it said my son hasn't lost a chess game in two years and like that's all you need to know because it's just like that means you're just and of course he was the one kid who didn't

want to play against me Right because if you're not if you haven't lost a chess game in two years you're not taking your on you're finding people who you can beat and you're only playing against them right so there's a couple levels to this let's let's dig into it so I think that people who have identity in being a prodigy develop a brittleness often because they associate their level of Mastery with Talent with something innate with being smarter more brilliant more more gifted Whatever and then that is you think about Carol D's work in entity

incremental Theories of Intelligence right that's an entity theory of intelligence um so I think there's that and there's something fundamentally brittle about that and then what what then one doesn't take risk one doesn't expose oneself One Associates one's Great Moments with something ingrained or inate versus the hard work that it took to get there and there's all sorts Of paralyzing Dynamics there oh there's also a tendency to lie Carol's for sure early papers referred to this in the discussion section you have to read deep into those papers but um she describes how the students who

did not have growth mindset that really um ident identified and held so much of their ego uh with their performance were at a significantly greater uh tendency to lie about their performance when they didn't do well to Themselves and to others that's right but the lying to oneself is the really interesting part right um so there's that Dimension right which you and I have both seen just countless manifestations of and believe me like when when you're competing against someone who you see has that kind of psychological construction they're done you can just break them right

you can f there's so many chins in the armor you can it's like so and so there's a Brittleness there like you can just find where the their mind stops with in false constructs where the energy stops where where their body is crimped right like you can just find their connection to the ground and explode through it and mental and physical disciplines if someone has that kind of of of identity in being the more brilliant one the more gifted one whatever they're their their prey um from a competitive perspective which you know is ultimately good

for Them if they expose themselves to it because then they have to take themselves on um but the the the dynamic that I was reflecting on in chess players is is a is a little next door to this which is that I think that like if you're learning how to play chess and let's just say I was teaching you do you play chess trivially okay so let's say I was teaching you to play chess right I could teach you to play chess with a language That is that is chess specific I can teach you chess

principles I can teach you very effectively with chess principles but I could also teach you just as effectively or maybe somewhat more effectively but it's to say just as effectively with chess principles that are also life principles right and it's interesting when you watch most chess teachers they teach in a localized manner so people can spend 20 years inside of Chess but never break beyond The 64 squares or they can from the age of six or seven on be learning that Principle as it connects to chest but also seeing how it connects to life could

you give me an example of one such principle because I love in biology teaching not names um not using nouns but instead teaching verbs because ultimately if you want to understand for instance how the nervous system works or the immune system you teach the verb actions of yeah molecules and the names Of the molecules are important if you decide to go into that field professionally but otherwise the principles and verbs are what's most important so what's an example of a principle of chess or a mode of action on on the board that you think transfers

everything transfers first of all okay like I mean if we're open to it then everything in chess connects so when people ask me do you still play chess I say metaphorically I mean I play chess All the time I just have not moved a piece in a l many many many years right so but okay to be specific so I could give you many examples but um all right so so in chess there's a bishop and there's a knight right they're both worth about three pawns now I could teach okay so the Knight moves like

an l and can jump over pieces the bishop moves diagonally and is stuck on one color for its whole life um they're both worth About three pawns but Knights are and I can just say to you but like Knights are a little bit better in closed positions because they can jump over things Bishops are a little better if the pawns if your pawns are on the opposite color from from them right but you should also know that that that Rooks and Bishops are are Bishops and knights are about the same Rooks and Bishops are much

stronger than Rooks and knights and you should also know that queens and knights Are a bit stronger than queens and Bishops so The Bishop's value is a Little Bit Stronger compared with a rook and the queen Knight's value a little bit stronger with a queen and pawn structure influences them right so I could teach you a very simple set of principles through which you can understand how to evaluate Bishops and knights right and there's many other layers to that but like that's some of it right I could also teach you the same Thing and be

teaching you like the nature of relativity I could be teaching you the nature of of like of interdependence right I could teach you the nature of like I could teach you the pawn structure play that dict like the way you can play with Pawn structure that influences Bishops and knights in ways that are chess specific or in ways that just allow you to understand Dynamic quality and static quality you Know what leaps to mind when you made that description and I was didn't follow all of it to memorization was um Family Feud you I just

imagine two families in a feud right you get two brothers together they can do certain things but you get a brother and sister together I have a sister she can do certain things that are powerful and diabolical in ways that two brothers can't right yes you get two two big strong Brothers but maybe one that can't you know creep Through small places and so you can map to different you know that's sort of more of an just kind of an analogy for it all but I started to immediately think about like oh it's like a

Family Feud if I were to view the pieces as uh as sibling Dynamics and parent sibling cousin Dynamics um it's like matchups with humans or or in basketball like this team is better than this team and this team but against there's some matchups that are much are hugely Favorable a lot of like the inside game of basketball is around is around which teams Thrive against which other teams even though they might be inferior because of the nature of the construction of the team and you have networks of those teams then how do you deal with

lineups how do you deal with rotation patterns like the inner game of basketball is all based on the same stuff that dictates the bishop and the KN and the rook and the Queen and how They influence it right it's interdependence beautiful it's relativity it's Dynamic quality then you could think about Robert PK's work and and there Motorcycle Maintenance and lla around Dynamic quality versus static quality and you can be teaching a student while you're teaching about rook and Bishop and rook and Knight or Knights and Bishops you can be teaching them about Dynamic quality right

and then you can and then You can like expand into the study of the metaphysics of quality and then you have a seven-year-old student who's learning chess or 12-year-old who's learning chess or who's learning about life and philos ophy and everything and you can do it in the same amount of time but you're just you're you're trapping a mind inside of 64 squares or you're teaching a mind about life through the 64 squares and I think so many of the reasons that people who become excellent In one thing can't translate it into other places it's

not will later on in life they have the will it's because they didn't learn with universal principles they didn't study their art with a presence to the importance of interconnectedness which is a lot of what my life's work is in I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking Capacity now I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night now one of the best ways to ensure a great

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mattress cover for nearly four years now and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep eight sleep recently launched their newest generation of the Pod cover Called the Pod 4 ultra the Pod 4 ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity I find that very useful because I like to make the bed really cool at the beginning of the night even even colder in the middle of the night and warm as I wake up that's what gives me the most slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep it also has snoring detection that

will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your air flow and stop your snoring if you'd Like to try an eight Sleep mattress cover you can go to 8sleep.com huberman to access their Black Friday offer right now with this Black Friday discount you can save up to $600 on their pod 4 ultra this is eight sleep's biggest sale of the Year eight8 sleep currently ships to the US USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's 8sleep.com huberman when I think about interconnectedness I think the word Mapping comes to mind

and I Define a map of any kind as a transformation of one set of points into another set of points right points along the Earth transferred onto a page or an electronic map you know and um what's missing from a kind of basic understanding of a transformation of points into another transformation of points are these verb actions like it's the the algorithm if you will um that's not present uh in how we map one context onto another context It requires a lot of thinking to do what you describe it's it I don't think it's reflexive

for most people to say watch a game of basketball and think about the uh the emotional Dynamics and the consistencies of the emotional Dynamics like last night I had the great gift of Josh brought me to a Celtics game so brought me to a Celtics game and they were playing the Clippers so I was you know cheering against the hometown crowd here in Los Angeles and uh um but it was Friendly and you were describing the players and their recent history and the kind of last season the season and you said something about um the

difference between preconscious effort and postc conscious effort yes maybe we could talk about that as a Gateway into ego which is like a term that the moment you throughout the word ego it's like saying sex it's like people make all sorts of assumptions about what it is and what it isn't but let's talk about pre-conscious And postcon yeah um because we'll get back to the Celtics and and and the game that was played last night by the way the Celtics won in overtime um by a good siiz margin so um there's something very beautiful that

I think all of us are drawn to as observers but hopefully everyone gets to experience this at some point in their life as well firsthand when somebody in art music sport or whatever is just being Themselves and this seeming virtuosity comes out I if I think about kind of what Rick Rubin does a lot of what Rick has done historically is to find artists and work with artists and just bring out what they're already doing like the core elements like when BC boy started it was it was like a joke he said and they were

kind of making fun of had wrestling elements and hardcore and punk and all this stuff and Hip-Hop And you know but he tends to work with artists early on when they're in that really like pure state of not thinking about the Returns on their investment and all that and you know he said many times before to me and and publicly that you know after people achieve a certain level of Fame it's much harder to get back to that just pure picture of oneself preconscious expression just Josh being Josh as an eight-year-old you just happen to

be in Washington Square Park learning chess or you know pick any number of different examples so very different than when people now reflect on their trophies on the wall or their platinum records or the fact that they won and lost or that there's another champion in the house that you know that um and the real virtuosos seem to be people that um can get back to that over and over again the yo-yo Mas the you know um and people Live longer now so it used to be the the mozarts the Box you know they could

make their contribution and and then uh they died yeah now we live longer lives so um people have many more chances but there's also that longer window for uh lack of productivity this is a a a really important theme and it's a Gateway into so much like we can we can explore a lot through this this tunnel when I use this term pre-conscious and postc conscious artist or competitor It's it's it's my own language so I'll describe what I what I mean by it um like you think about myself in the in the Chess World

right like they like one discovers an art one feels a passion for it one it's beautiful it's joyous it's self-expressive I love the battle I'm winning I'm losing I'm having fun I'm just letting it rip right there's this there's a navit to that there's a a there's a freedom there's a playfulness right there's there's a lack of Complexity a lack of self-awareness a lack of awareness of my own mutability a lack of awareness that I can be shattered or I can die a lack of awareness of the existential absurdity of the fact that I'm devoting

my life to 64 squares and 32 pieces of wood on top of 64 squares I haven't reflected on the fact that this is ridiculous right or if if you're fighting like what am I doing I'm spending my life in combat like what About what about love what about saving the planet what about everything else like what I I haven't reflected on the fact that this is just a joke and its absurdity right and one's liberated from those kinds of things and then there Comes This Moment and for me it was you know triggered by the

movie by um by losing that sense of self-expression by thinking what would someone else do here instead of what what would what's my you know Freedom my Playfulness tell me to do um it can happen when one has a near-death experience right it can happen when one has one one's heart broken it can happen when one um starts Reading existentials literature and reflecting on the absurdity of things or one has a friend who starts pointing out over and over like this is ridiculous you're just playing chess what are you doing right or it can happen

when one wins the world championship or the NBA Finals Because suddenly the thing that you have oriented yourself around your whole life the goal you had your whole life you've now accomplished and now you're on the other side of it and so suddenly your world is shifted the things that motivated you no longer motivate you the things that felt so important to you now seem somewhat trivial because you've already accomplished that like where's the intrinsic motivation where's the like The Deep self-expression right you think about um like as a as we gain complexity in our

psychology and we can gain that complexity in many different ways we hit this Tunnel right and and often when someone becomes self-aware um or when someone becomes less liberated um or like the chain sit in or when one like gu just say you're an extreme athlete but you feel invincible and then suddenly you have a terrible Accident you realize holy I could actually die I can break then how do you get back to that freedom of taking the wild risks that you've been taking as that extreme athlete with an awareness of the fact that you

can you can die like for me I had you know I I I foil now in the biggest waves that I can find in in in where I live in Costa Rica and you know you have big hold Downs you can have you're foiling on top of a of a Long Mass which is a carbon Mass which is very sharp and then a wing which is sharp so you're basically going 40 45 miles on top of a guillotine and if you're trying to you know you're you're really cultivating high performance foiling you're pushing turns really

hard you're breaching wing tips like you can taco and have the thing come right at your head or your neck like you can die at any minute if you get something wrong which is very different like foiling Straight or EF foiling talking about high performance training like you by definition have to be risking these things in order to push the limits of what's possible and if you're not you're not at that stretch point right and but then suddenly like you have a terrible injury or let's just say you're like I drown in the bottom of

a pool um some 11 years ago 10 11 years ago I heard about this yeah it was a I was doing um hypoxic breath work I did not realize Which maybe if I you could have taught me if if I'd known you that carbon dioxide what gives you the urge to breathe I didn't realize that so I had all the CO2 flushed out of my body I felt blissful swimming underwater um yeah exhale I guess we should save a few lives here or prevent a few deaths rather anytime you emphasize the duration or intensity of

your exhales you're going to blow out more carbon dioxide carbon dioxide is the trigger For the gasp reflex so yes you'll be able to hold your breath longer above or below water if you first do cyclic hyperventilation and then a long and dump all your air but never ever ever do cyclic hyperventilation folks or any long exhale emphasized breathing even standing in a puddle because that gasp reflex is the thing that makes you shoot for the surface and if you don't do that you feel pretty peaceful until lights out or drive a car Don't do

it while driving a car I know people who have done that actually rather exceptional people who I know have done don't yeah dumping carbon dioxide is let you hold your breath longer but that that's part of the problem and shallow water blackout usually happens to very high level athletes Navy Seals right because they're training at pushing their limits they're learning to to suppress the urge to breathe that and know if you're Flushing CO2 you're learning you're training yourself not to feel it and I've been a free diver my whole life I grew up free diving

spear fishing in the in the southern Bahamas but I wasn't I wasn't doing hypoxic breath work while free diving here I was at the NYU pool I I drowned I was in the bottom of the pool for four and a half minutes after blacking out which four and a half minutes yeah I should have which I know because it I should be dead or brain Damaged in a big way uh the I know the time it was because there was an old man who I knew who was in the locker room who saw me in

the bottom of the pool lying there and he timed his laps and he did four laps and he said after the third one I'm going to check on him and then he did his fourth lap pulled me and his lip laps for a little bit over a minute and um I was unconscious for 25 minutes I was totally blue except my face was blown out red my eyes my body My training almost killed me and also saved me my body handled it really well I had no water in my lungs I spent that night in

the hospital of course um and I was like testing I remember doing like remembering old chest variations like testing my mind in any way like was I ruined um and I somehow survived and I survived intact and that's one of those moments shattering moments which I'm ultimately grateful for because it's What catalyzed me to I emerged with more of a commitment and I've had this kind of commitment in my life for most for many years but a more intense commitment to live life as truly and beautifully and authentically as conceivable and then soon after we

move to the jungle and we live life we live now which is awesome with my family um but but I bring that up now because like imagine how one relates to big wave surfing or big wave foiling Pre and post drowning right there's like one has to have an integrated sense for one's own mortality versus being naive to the fact that it can happen right so that tunnel from the the preconscious to the postc conscious per former is a passage where during that passage most people are locked up they underperform where they were when they

were more naive and I don't personally relate to it as a return to The pre-conscious state I relate to it as an integration of one's mortality of the existential absurdity um into one's Consciousness and then a discovery of a deeper sense of liberation of freedom but that is not in denial of what we've learned in that tunnel or what triggered that tunnel but that is is more more complex yeah trying to be our previous selves is not a great strategy trying to integrate our previous experiences in Our current and future selves seems like a good

strategy I I feel that way and I think it's also pretty you can't go back you can't pretend you're not that dying is impossible you can't pretend that you're unbreakable we are breakable some people do it without being really reflective but I think that if if you ask anyone who really has been in life and death situations as a way of life for a long time whether they relate to the idea of fearlessness if they really Reflect on it they'll say no because fearlessness isn't a thing it's how one works with fear usually what locks

people up isn't fear it's the fear of fear right we're afraid of our fear we're afraid of being afraid but like you ask like a great Navy SEAL they work with their fear you ask like a a great MMA fighter they're not without fear of course they have fear if they don't have fear they have a problem right and there are some examples of people who might be Wired a little bit differently right like but the integration of the more complex worldview into one's Liberation is the postc conscious performer right and it can be it

can play in lots of ways right it can also play and so like one thing that when you think about a sports team that has accomplished like everyone's dreams and now we want to win a championship again we can't go back to what worked before because we're they're different Men right one needs to find a different kind of mission a different kind of internal relationship to the mission a different kind of Freedom how important do you think it is to attach language to these things of identity and source of motivation in other words let's say

okay you're working with the Celtics they won the championship last year this year they are in a completely different mental frame as a consequence they're quote unquote Dominant in the sense that they hold the they hold the crown they hold the trophy but they're more vulnerable too because the only place to go from there is either stay or you're you're going down a notch or more so do you think it's important for them to create a verbal label for where they're at like we're the Champs and we're going to hold on to the Belt we're

going to hold on to I realize there's not a belt in basketball that by the way that they're going to Hold on to the their status or is that the wrong way to think about it because the game is played through verbs it's not uh played through um adjectives I don't think we ever want to hold on to like that's static like we need to we we want to like you think about predator and prey Dynamics in in the world or in competition or in anything like you want to be competing now there's a fusion

of the predator and prey you want to have the awareness that that prey has but one Wants to have be be playing to win not not to lose the moment we're we're trying to hold on to something we already have we're falling into the static quality right or or you think about for example brilliant investors right they'll they'll have success then they'll try to figure out how to replicate their success so they'll build mental models Frameworks to replicate their success and those become grooves like neural Pathways so then they follow Those grooves but then the

grooves become a rut and the water stops and they get stuck in an old like so they they they succeeded they built mental models they recreated the patterns it was beautiful but then it it got static and then it's got stuck energy and it doesn't apply to the world cuz the world's changing and what actually made them succeed was Dynamic quality was being at the like what Robert persk would call the front of the freight Train driving through SpaceTime pre-int tellectual Consciousness right and then they're trying to recreat they're getting too stuck in things and

they create mental models that are stale and then other people replicate those stale mental models and you have huge industries that emerge from static quality later on top of static quality which is most of humanity right so I think that as a world-class competitor who's trying to Win after winning one needs to have the same Dynamic mindset one had when one was hunting forth in the first place rediscovery Marcelo Garcia one of my most one of my favorite moments of Marcelo was um so we were so Marcelo nine-time world champion in the grappling Arts five

time ADCC five time Brazilian Jitsu four time ADCC ADCC is when Abu combat Championship when all the different grappling Arts come together it happens Every two years so Russian Judo wrestling Jud um Jiu-Jitsu right everything comes together and you see what's who's the strongest Grappler in all the different Arts um he he's known by by many as um the greatest pound-for-pound Grappler to ever live just for context Marcelo is um one of my dearest friends we own a school together in New York um we trained together for very very long time he and his he's

in an amazing moment right now um he and His wife Tachi who's also one of my dearest friends had a terrible tragedy years ago they lost a baby um and the just devastating period and then Marcelo had cancer he had stomach cancer he had surgery eight rounds of chemotherapy he hasn't competed in 13 years and he's actually competing tomorrow for the first time in I think it's 13 years in Bangkok um it was going to be in Denver and I was going to fly there between the Lakers and the Mavs games but it's in Bangkok

so I can't get there but he's weighed in he's doing great he's feeling awesome so um the story I'm about to tell is about this epic beautiful human being who in many ways created he's he's the innovator that led to much of what is modern grappling today so back in I think it was I think it was 2005 and 2007 this story or maybe it's 2007 2009 I think it's 2005 and 2007 chronology is not a strong point for me in terms of my my recollection in general um we were in A training camp um

we were you know training all the time he had this Innovative repertoire he goes into ADCC dominates it and it's a very specific repertoire backt repertoire Guillotines um just dominates blows the grappling world away for the two years that followed him winning that ADCC the en entire grappling world was studying what he had just done or a lot of the grappling world was studying what he had just recreated it was so beautiful Innovative powerful playing upweight classes just unbelievable I was on the mats with Marcel the next day the Monday after he fought Sunday I

also want to say Marcelo never I never in all the years I had of training with Marcelo I never saw him miss a Monday training after winning a major competition on Sunday wow everyone takes time off I never saw him miss a Monday you talk about Dynamic quality and humility and a way of life right the Monday he he was on the mats he shed the entire repertoire so he just won the World Championship he he everyone spent the next two years chasing his quality which was dynamic they turned it static he shed the whole

repertoire and created a whole new repertoire and he was playing this om plaed game which he then went on the the next ADC two years later and one again with this brand new thing just shedding the the snake skin or shedding the the old Shell right it's It's such a beautiful example of like pushing one's limits as a way of life not being stuck in Old mental models right breaking new ground as a way of life Dynamic quality that's what it takes and so hard for people to do I mean I think about Michael Jordan

and the fact that he wanted to be a pro baseball player so he had a brief stint at that and it was underwhelming certainly compared to his basketball career but of course his b basketball Career was you know so spectacular that you know the expectation wasn't there but um nonetheless you know it's so rare to find people that are super successful repeatedly within domain let alone across domains it's just yeah you know Richard Fineman yeah he could paint a little bit and draw a little bit but I don't know I've seen those pictures of the

roosters and they're they're they're they're kind of first year art school Yeah so it's cool like cool you learned to draw in paint but you weren't like if if his name wasn't on them like no one would care well Jordan had an Inc just an incredible competitive Drive incredible competitive drive and like the amount of like there it's very hard to replicate success in an art because one that shouldn't replicate one should drive to recre to to ReDiscover right it's like a recreation of something new not old right um I think the impulse Once one

wins is to do what one did before but the world changes like one of the gifts the Celtics have this year is that everyone is targeting us right because we're the Champions like we won it last year and so everyone brings like an extra 30% every night every team and the NBA is stacked with brilliant athletes even the lower level teams from the outside in are filled with amazing athletes who if you if you're the game of the week or the month for them they Bring it all so all of our weaknesses are being exposed

which is what we want right and so you have there's a there's grown pains you work through it all um and so the good thing about the competitive truth-telling world is that is that our competitors our Rivals help Force us to take our on which makes it very hard to sit in static quality unless we're we're happy with mediocrity the the Celtics have you know one of the the most Joe moua is the head coach of The of the Boston Celtics and he's one of he and I are dear friends and for the last two

and a half years or so we've been thought partners and and um and brothers in this journey and I've I've never seen anyone in my life better at turning weaknesses into strengths than Joe which is a huge statement because I spent my life with these with all in performers not taking weaknesses and like making them less weak or like leveling them out but turning like an Area of core weakness into a Core Power Zone that's a superpower and that's something that Jo Joe trains harder than anybody else and he leads by example and he leads

with vulnerability and there's some he EMB body's Dynamic quality and that's really special and that's something I have unbelievable respect for and you look at Joe now like Joe just has learned to just thrive in pain and discomfort in in his limits in living at his limits and and that's That's like the leadership which I think will lead to beautiful things so I feel like there are at least three components to what you're describing one is that you know maybe in this preconscious phase people are thinking about what they have to gain from this process

that they're in and the process is natural at least to the extent that they're motivated to do it it comes from some Source this seems to be the the stage And the thing that Rick Rubin is trying to tap into in the artists that he works with whether or not they're established or new it's that it's the identification of that preconscious energy which is so pure and So Beautiful by definition as opposed to the second thing which is when people have something to lose you know they went from poverty to having a really nice home

they bought their mom a home they're loving this life they don't want To lose it they don't want to go back to where they were before even though where they were before probably played a key role in that preconscious state that allowed them to get to that next level versus something to protect and you know trying to not lose everything you've got is very different than trying to protect certain elements of what you one has so like in in terms of the Celtics they they hold the championship title now so they have you Know something

to lose frankly they could not get it again but it's it's in the record books so so it's it's nuanced right it's not like um in in a fight you can get knocked out or worse but you know they you're still a champion if you were a champion once I mean certain fields are like that well going back to back is a is a is an approach way of framing that mhm like going back to back is if from protecting the title right cuz then you the words like reigning Champions you know it's like even

though you're already the reigning Champion you know or um you think about dynasties like I grew up in the when the 49ers were like kind of in multiple dynasties it was like the Joe Montana era and the Steve Young era and like you know like these dynasties where they were just considered such an important team overall because of how long they were able to do what they did the Bulls right you know um so Tiger Woods Right and there seems to be a kind of obsession with this process at least in the United States where

we love to see the rise of somebody from uh you know ignominy to fame or rags to riches and then but there also seems to be this kind of obsession with their fall their demise and then coming back again and I think the the the most um you know prominent example of this in my mind is Mike Tyson whose life is like as a friend described it is almost Shakespearean and the way they came from nothing thing then youngest heavyweight champion then all these issues you know legal and financial then back again and and now

he seems to be in kind of he's at least of a level of status where he can wear his own shirt and no one thinks it's weird it actually looks cool he's probably the only only guy that who can wear a shirt with his own name on it and he just and it just seems right like he earned that one you know and I think it Ironically it was The Hangover it was him pretending to have a you know act as an actor that kind of brought him back as a lovable character it's kind of

interesting like he he seems to now be on the Mount Rushmore of famous American athlet who you know like I only wish the best for him but whatever happens next like that that he it's cemented his legacy is cemented at some point people's Legacy is cemented and I I Wonder how that feels too so maybe we could talk about these different stages of the the sine wave that hopefully is upward and drifting right one of the things that I that's that's very difficult in in in modern society and in the life of a professional athlete

or team in modern society is that you know you think about NBA players they're always being interviewed by the media and the they're all and the media is always trying to drum up drama and Always trying to ask if you like the the media always asks the question that is exactly what the performance psychologist of the player would not want the player to think about so for example like they might ask something about like how do you feel knowing you can the expect ations for of you are so large you can never live up to

them right like or is it shameful do you feel ashamed about your performance now because of the expectations on you the Questions like that will be or your wife is eight months pregnant like how do you feel being you know uh 5,000 miles away right now that would be pretty benign right yeah it's like thanks you know right there's something because like you want a player to be liberated from self-consciousness you don't want a player to be playing with an awareness or a fixation on external expectations or the external eye one like I remember the

feeling in my chest life when I Transitioned from losing myself in thought to thinking about how I looked thinking to the cameras or the groupies or whatever on the outside like wildly different mindsets as a chess player right and and so you have all these pressures that are trying to pull you out of an ideal performance State and so one needs to learn develop thick skin or a way of integrating it or be playful with it and I really believe in embracing Adversity we have this theme hunting adversity on the team which is like like

these things that could be um seen as detrimental or you know problems or or things that could get in the way of our Liberation as like we welcome them like cold water right getting in cold water every day is a very important I think it's a beautiful opportunity to train it so much like but we don't want to get in cold water gritting our teeth and hating it no we want to like love the fact that We're about to suffer in that cold water I've been cold plunging for you know many many years maybe 15

years and like I it's not like you get into 34 degree water even if you've been training for a very long time you're thrilled about this 5 minute or 10minute plunge you're about to do most consistent stimulus for adrenaline release and noradrenaline release in the brain that is safe if done properly right and you never really habituate I maybe we just really quickly Double click on this thing of coal plunging I don't go for time I think only in terms of walls of adrenaline so some days like just getting in the thing is a big

wall I think of that just for lack of a better word is a wall on on a hot day I'm happy to get into the cold plunge yeah but then what I think is so valuable about cold plunging is that if you start to focus on what what neuroscientists call interoception everything our perception of everything From our skin inward you can start to feel the deployment of adrenaline in your body or at least its effects and you can see here's another wall of adrenaline you watch your frame rate go up the impulse to stay still

because as you move you break up that thermal layer gets even colder but then you also want to get out and then that wall passes and then you start to notice that the distance between the walls changes and then playing with that in one's mind as You know when I when I distract myself the walls come you know suddenly or when I'm focused on the walls they they seem like big swells as opposed to um when I relax myself they seem like just like kind of more sharp Peaks and and learning that those dynamics of

of how adrenaline impacts us cognitively and frame rate and all that I think is an immensely valuable practice and I can't think of anything else not sprinting not lifting weights you know not real life Arguments because that can be destructive I can't think of any other kind of venue for exploring one's ability to work through stress and tension than the cold plunge I I agree and I have this principle I call living on the other side of pain and I think that like pain one can like mental discomfort physical discomfort or confronting some issue one

doesn't want to think about or taking on one's bias pattern or if you're let's say like a Decision professional decision maker taking on like what the network of your cognitive biases tends to lead to like these are all forms of pain right I think that cold water training is such an Exquisite way to practice living on the other side of pain in a way that is thematically resonant and you can train at that doing that physical practice can liberate you in your mental Arenas to um to take on you don't want to take on one

thing I found is that when you're Training Peak performers there can be the impulse to go right at their weakness in the place they're they're making the error but it's usually much less potent to do it that way because they're well calloused over in that area so if you're like a poker player who has like some control issue right it's you could like take on the control issue in poker but there so brilliant at poker like they've built calluses around it they've built ways of dealing with it And they're able to play at a high

level despite but like but they're probably very controlling at home as well with their with their spouse or their kids or whatever and if you take on the control issues in places they're much less developed it'll be much easier to take it on because it's less callous and it will be massively liberating in their poker game so I have like this is this connect this idea of interconnectedness and thematic interconnectedness I'll Identify a theme someone needs to work with but then we'll practice that theme in other of their life and then you could have core

habits which manifest that theme and then there comes this amazing moment where the theme just becomes like internalized because one practices it in things that are away from where it manifests professionally and then it just releases and then all the manifestations of that theme just become your way of life so for example Like if if one wants to take on one's resistance to to discomfort to pain to pushing one's limits right one can practice things like cold plunging like cardiovascular interval training like you know other things like withholding orgasm whatever you can have ways of

practicing like the theme that are completely separate from where it's manifesting or hindering you in your professional life where you're probably very good at dealing with it and then The unlock will just happen and you'll be liberated from it right this is one of the most powerful ways that I've found to to train I also find Cold plunging is just unbelievable for for Sleep Quality for I do you know I do contrast training now and I I agree with you like I've spent a lot for years I was doing like really long cold Like 36°

Water for 11 or 12 minutes and I pushed myself really hard um and man 11 minutes is so different from 9 minutes oh Different world and then and now I don't now I I I found that like I have a practice of you I'll do three to four rounds of you know 42 to 44 degrees between that and the sauna and I I'll do like one longer plunge a week but like I'm daily practice I don't feel the urge to do very long breath holds or very long cold plunges I don't necessar yeah same I'll

I'll do cold plunge for one to three minutes yeah and I love contrast with heat so I'm very heat tolerant I I Love I love love love the sauna um I don't love the cold but I love the long Arc of dopamine that comes after the cold I always say no no one really enjoys being in the thing I you be feel 10 is there a better sleep hack I'm asking you cuz you know stuff well there are supplements that could support sleep and that kind of thing and people learning how to deliberately relax their

body can help with transition to sleep and back to sleep but you know One Core Principle that I haven't really talked about in the podcast is that if you the more adrenaline nor epinephrine nor adrenaline and dopamine that you experience early in the day as well as cortisol from bright light exercise caffeine and cold the better you're going to sleep at night it also sets your circadian rhythm around kind of like a a big uh you know instead of arousal promoting stimula early in the day and then you know last third of your Day you're

very parasympathetic for lack of a better way to put it and that eases the transition of sleep I mean you know dimming the lights parasympathetic Bright Lights increases the amount of cortisol with your morning cortisol pulse by 50% 5 Z which is great keeps you less susceptible to infection all day these kinds of things and we're meant to be in oscillation obviously across the 24-hour cycle but even within the day uh it's a little bit tougher When people have evening activities or you like last night I was watching these guys play a hard game of

basketball at you know 8 to 10 p.m. that's that's a lot of late night work so and we're on the west coast you can think what time that is East Coast time middle of the night right so is there a better sleep stack not really I mean and if you want to increase your rapid ey movement sleep non-pharmacologically yeah I would say meaning not exogenous pharmacology um Yeah the cold Plunge in the morning early part of the day for evening um anything that moves uh blood out to your periphery so sauna uh hot shower that

sort of thing is going to drop your core body temperature when you get out right it's a little paradoxical to people but you know you warm up to then cool off at the level of core body temperature and it'll ease the transition as sleep yeah it's it's it's a wonderful practice and People who pick at Cold plunging they're like well it blocks hypertrophy okay yeah okay that's true so in the six hours after you're trying to get your you know a little more Peak on your biceps or something it's going to block that but most

people have not experienced control over their physiology at the level that comes from doing consistent cold punching in the early part of the day warming up and becoming more parasympathetic uh later In the day it's like they start to feel a level of control over their mood and energy that's that's so striking with basically zero cost tools I agree yeah sorry to Riff on that but people will probably wonder about specifics I I want to make sure that we talk about two things and you can decide which one uh to talk about first one is

ego and then the second one is earlier you described a um a set of Dynamics across the day and Some concrete things about you know how one picks the most important question like what am I working on today and how to kind of push that into certain portions of the day how long to do that and then how to you know stay out of stimulus and response and the transition points so that you can make the most of that work or or extract the most from that work as you head into the evening dinner with

your family sleep and then wake up repeat which one do you Think would be most valuable games go wherever you want to go where should we go all right let let's before we get practical um let's get a little bit more um theoretical and then uh get back to practical ego like the constriction is what comes to mind like the idea that like I want to impose my will on something uh I want a certain outcome and if I don't get it it's going to hurt in some way there's some punishment mechanism internally Like that

might drive me to work even harder it's not always bad but how how do you frame ego and and uh I will say that the words I am um seem very important like when people identify as I am the champion in the I'm part of a champion team in the NBA I'm a Celtic you know I'm a a player you know I'm a Celtics player um clearly I'm not but you know when we attach identity to Ego um that's also where it seems like it kind of deepens the trench a bit but maybe it can

be more relaxed than the way I'm describing it how do you think about ego we we had so gram Duncan my dear friend joined us at the game last night and um Grandma I consider to be in the realm of like Elite mental Talent mapping and assessment to just be in a league of his own he's such a genius in the realm of um of of just finding and like like identifying people who Have world-class potential and mental Arenas and really quirky ways he he's a he's a beautiful soul and one of the the the

ways he frames this in the investment space when he's looking at at high potential investors is like he doesn't want to find people who have too specific an identity in the way that they relate to um to what they do to make money to invest to whatever he that like because it like there's something static in like I am a x y or Z versus I Am something more Broad and it which leads to one's relationship to like d Dynamic quality to rediscovery to changing as the world changes right um I think that that um

this relates a little bit to what I was describing in terms of learning chess locally versus learning chess in a way that connects to all of life which is so Dynamic I think you know I spent many years studying mamaka Buddhist philosophy and and so I I come from both A western and Eastern perspective when I think about the question of ego and I think that one of the things that that happens in the west when we talk about East Asian philosophy is that we oversimplify it and we we create we kind of polarize things

and I I I think so it's easy to people talk so quickly about being egoless right or say someone is low ego and when they say they're low ego they don't actually mean that they're low ego they mean that they have A sound egoic structure like they're they're not inse like if they say they're low ego they're usually saying that that they are um they're not expressing insecurity all the time which means that it's not that they have a low ego it's that their ego is is is not like is not fundamentally like there's not

a rupture in the structure that's leaking all the time um so the way I I relate to Ego from like a a competitive perspective or from a like A artistic perspective or a self cultivation perspective is that I relate to it around Dynamic versus static constant exploration as opposed to being stuck in how one relates to Old patterns I relate to understanding The Emptiness of our our egoic Dynamics understanding the the non-absolute nature of our ego the relational nature of things the interconnectedness and the and the Interdependence of all things I think it's so easy

to have an identity which we think is like I am this but we're not this this doesn't exist out of relation to that and that doesn't relate in Rel in relation to this other thing so understanding the chain of relationality and then how our ego manifests in all of that so having the ability to both dissolve one's relationship to like static egoic Dynamics but also um having a sense of Identity and having a sense of what one self- expression is and having like when we are there is this thing about Will when you're competing like

you can feel when someone has an unbreakable will like when you're matching up against somebody and they're and they're and they're wishy-washy you can just blow through them um but you when their when their will is just like like I I'll never forget Marcelo Garcia against K kisan in a big in a big world Championship match putting kisan was wrist locking everybody and Marcel put his hand right into the wrist lock and looked into his eyes it's like try it just put his hand into it and there like you can break someone by being unbre

breakable you can see a lot of fights where somebody tries to submit someone and someone is unsubmitted and the person who has the huge Advantage gets broken because they realize holy this guy Is unbreakable and so they become broken right so there's having the ability to have that like when you when you touch a fighter like body Fighters all rub up against each other like you learn a lot like feeling someone so if you meet like Fighters that hug they'll give you you learn so much on the touch you know and like you can feel

when someone is is is brittle you touch them you can feel you can feel how much contact they've taken How much they've been hit how much they've absorbed how much they've been abused how much like they've received and you can feel like where their energy stops you can feel if there's like like just just static things in them and then you can also feel when the earth is moving inside of them when it's just like this molten energy just moving in them and then and and when you feel a body that like like it just

can envelop you um and it can be a mountain or it Can be like water so I relate to Ego and that you want to be able to be like water and be like a mountain um I've never answered that question before I just Rift on that but that's like the essence of how Rel to I mean and um and as I walked in here to take a seat at my chair I got a good hard slap on the back from you and I was wondering if you were testing me um I felt you last

night too yeah I I I I won't I won't ask what what your read of My ego was but um I I felt it as a slap of camaraderie like like let's do this um which felt great and I was also thinking about my good friend Lex fredman who is a black Bel in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a very intense guy who wears his heart on his sleeve publicly and people sometimes will take um shots at him for that which really upsets me I really respect Lex I think what he does is awesome I I love

his podcast and the way he in really prickly issues has got It got people on both sides of things and welcomes everyone in and has dialogue I have a huge amount of respect for how Lex handles himself in the public world yeah you guys are a fun conversation he uh he's going to be uh jealous that we got a chance to sit down here but um you know Lex's uh at home and with his friends exactly how he appears to be like all that that intense um self- torture around what to do and how to

Frame something who to talk to how to talk to them and um that's that's the world he lives in and and um and but in terms of his physicality like I think PE it's hard to understand like just how um like he's like dense like dark matter you know like it's the it's the and I think a lot of guys that roll Jiu-Jitsu like you shake their hands and like the there there's a there's a solidity there that's very very different um than uh just muscle it's like people that are Just like um they're used

to being up against bodies apparently you know so it's an experience you know um these are subtle things but clearly they matter um and as you've pointed out one brings them to their professional life you bring it to friendships you know I can't think of I have many super quote unquote solid friends but Lex is among the most solid of them he's just beauti his presence yeah he has a courageousness with which he in my observation from Afar comports itself in the world that I have a lot of respect for and Rick Ruben you know

uh we both know Rick and people know Rick as this bearded uh icon of create creativity and and he he is indeed that um the fluidity that he moves through life with is just it's like it's astonishing I've spent a lot of time with him and I I don't want to like get into my observations of Rick the Rick isms uh if you will but um it's astonishing how much Attention and uh he puts into creating this thing that we're talking about space like getting out of stimulus and response it's I don't think he'd mind

me sharing this it's not uncommon for me to like go over to hang out with him and he'll just say like hey like before we like talk you want to just like do this meditation we just like sit there and meditate and you quickly go into a mindset of like oh my goodness like this is like a thing where and then but like Nope you just get into being present and then I don't know then you hang out and you talk about if you're us you know the the Ramones because we both love the Ramon

yeah so um I love the way you frame ego I think that that's very helpful um because a physical embodiment of something that is largely psychological to most people at least the concept I think is is very helpful K do you ever um just as a practice just look at how people walk or how they they Interact or um oh yeah yeah I mean of course that's my way of life I mean it's funny as a as a chess player even like I used to study people off the board all the time I'd watch them

like you watch I remember used to play these tournaments in Bermuda and once a year Invitational like high level tournament and then like you'd watch someone walking and they'd get caught in the rain and you watching someone in the rain you learn so much like would they just stand and embrace It would they put something over their head and run away what would they do right like and and in general like I If someone if someone has a static like like negative relation to the Rain they're usually pretty controlling and then you you have a

feel for how to handle them on the board create Chaos on the board like just just like mix it up make it uncontrollable and then or if someone is like full free spirit on the in the rain like me like maybe you want To make the game like a little bit more quiet conservative like strategic not so chaotic like where one has to find exact precise Solutions in specific kinds of positions where like you you can't improvise you you're not finding hidden harmonies and Chaos you're finding specific thing right control and reain and and then

in the the fight game man you're watching people all the time I mean you watch Fighters watching one Another you see a lot feeling one another watching one another and I ow love watching people away from what they do cuz all those themes are are are much more visible than in when they're doing what what they do what about in non-competitive Endeavors like ballet Opera um uh music where certainly it's competitive in that you know you're competing for people's attention time and money but you're not it's not direct competition uh do you spend time working

With P performers in in these domains where um you know like just I heard from someone recently who uh she said you know I'm a good dancer but then I went to New York and I discovered that I'm not such a good dancer like like the level of of who gets to actually dance in some of the Premier venues there is like so unbelievably high that um and by the way that shouldn't discourage anyone that should encourage people it's uh show them what's possible do you work With people like that or is it usually competitive

Arenas I've utilized competitive Fields as beautiful Laboratories for refin my relationship to the training process because of how relentlessly truth-telling they are but I also come from a family of artists my grandmother was a brilliant abstract expressionist painter and sculptor Stella waitzkin amazing woman um she was in the she was good friends with Hans Hoffman and Tuning and Jackson Pollock I mean that was her crowd she was part of the like the early Beat Generation back in the day and I come from a family of artists and um yeah I mean one of the you

know a lot of what I'm thinking about in recent years is how to channel my life's work into making the biggest positive impact possible on the world and I I'm really worried In This Moment around what's happening in human consciousness the Depths of distraction um how can we enhance the human ability to make decisions in an increasingly complex world where there's so much misinformation um and also you know how can we how can we take on Humanity's biggest challenges and so for example one of the projects that I'm really excited about that I've been working

on for the last couple years is called Lila science and these aren't competitors These are scientists and we're we're essentially we've so I I was sitting with this question for two or three years like who should I partner with to to try to take on Humanity's biggest challenges and I met this guy um he ended up renting Graham's house who we at the game with yesterday next door to mine in Costa Rica and um his name is Jeff v monel um and Jeff is a a just a brilliant scientific Visionary and Creator And um we

ended up having three weeks of dialogue and I incidentally like invested one of his companies years before which was interesting but we had like this incredible three weeks of dialogue while he was standing next door and then we looked at each other realized we should be teaming up and we've and and I've also been think very close close to and observing the world of artificial intelligence for a long time um partially because Demis hbus was A childhood friend of mine we grew up playing chess together from when you're like 11 years old and so I've

OB I observed his journey and um and I think that it's very interesting in in chess like the the seat that I had watching the impact on chess of first computers increasingly powerful machine and then artificial intelligence was fascinating because if you if you imagine like what it's like to see one's life's work be overcome in Three hours of experimentation like what Alpha zero did just breathtaking um and to give some perspective on things there's an ELO system in chess right there's the a ranking system the highest rated chess players in the world human chess

players are rated you know from Gary Kasparov Magnus Carlson Bobby Fisher all the world champions are rated somewhere in the 2800 to 29 00 level right ELO the strongest AI engines now are North of 3800 ELO and just for context of how Wild that Gap is when I was 8 years old my rating was 1,800 right so the gap between me at8 which is like I was ridiculous and the world champion human is the same Gap as the world champion and the strongest AI engines in the world and so like it's very hard for humans

to conceive of being the ants right relative to the human we are the ants now in terms of or we soon will Be what is possible and I I think that that could be channeled for the good or could be channeled for the Bad and the question what are the motivations of the people who are really driving these companies so I've been thinking for a long time of how to combine like what's the light side of the force of the artificial intelligence world and what Jeff and I and and a dear friend um Chris Fussell

who is a brilliant man who um he wrote team of teams in one Mission He was a elite Navy SEAL and then he ended up running joint Special Operations Command jck with Stan mccristal then he was president of the mccristal group and now he's president of ly of science um Jeff Chris and I and a brilliant man named Jack Milwood who's the chief cultural officer have been teaming up and I brought I brought together this tribe of a few different brilliant friends um who are part of this and Um it's basically taking Cutting Edge science

and taking Cutting Edge AI bring them together to create scientific super intelligence focused on and we're creating these AI science factories where the entire s scientific process can be replicated can be driven non-stop the way Alpha zero was driving non-stop iteration in the Chess World what if this is happening in the scientific process from so pose a hypothesis exper study isolate variables test hypothesis Feedback to hypothesis confirm or deny hypothesis and and just an experimental design and experimental execution and then study of experimental results and then and study of the entire scient scientific literature and

imagine all that happening with robotics with with 3,800 ELO rated scientists AI scientists and then millions of them networked and now if you have this from my perspective the most important thing is the safety right and I think that a Lot of these AI companies aren't prioritizing safety first we are and I think for me it's been a really important thing thinking about this because I've been sitting with this question for a lot of years like in order to do something like this you have to trust that the people who are driving it if they

have Max temptation but something could be like the Manhattan Project could be potentially negative for Humanity that They would not push the button they would lead to the satisfaction of all their dreams if it would be taking an existential risk for Humanity and this team I really believe in that way and so like what's most exciting to me about this is the material science side I mean the life sciences we could you know the eradication of disease it's unbelievable what could happen I think we'll be blown away by what happens in the coming years but

the material science part of it for Me personally is what matters most because I really don't think it matters if humans are all living for 150 200 years if we have no climate to live on right and and we the material innovations that could be emerging in the coming years um to take on the climate crisis are are breathtaking so it's a project I'm deeply involved in and it has nothing to do with competition I mean I guess everything is competitive from one perspective but This is about um driving Discovery driving Innovation I love it

it also reflects your uh clearly repeating pattern of um being willing to segment your life life into different goals and different um different Pursuits uh applying what you've learned previously learning new things and incorporating those it brings me back to two things that we touched on earlier uh one that if we don't close the hatch on we're going to we're going to get it From the listeners uh which is this paper that we both read I just want to um or or took a look at before the paper let me just say one important thing

to me what you just said really hits home like but I think while one is taking on all these different things for me personally it's important to always be in the fight like I need to be training myself like what I'm doing on the ocean every day in my own training like the thing that Drives me crazy are armchair quarterbacks or what Robert persk used to call philosophists right which are like or like the literary critics verus the writer or the philosophist versus the philosopher or the armchair quarterback versus the quarterback so for me like

my way of life like I I just don't know I it's hard for me to believe in anybody in these things who isn't putting themselves on the line as a way of life So like my own ocean training um and my own competitive training and like being immersed in the truth-telling nature of the competitive world is something that I I feel is really like like we never have the truth nailed we're never liberated from our egoic Dynamics we're always susceptible to becoming static that's I I've really come to feel that and I don't believe so

so like I it's a big value system for me and the daily physical interactions with The ocean with fear with uh uncertainty with the just variables that you can't control yeah and trying to identify what are the variables I can control in this context and work with those um to try and tease out new learning um uh that running those algorithms every day seems absolutely essential there's nothing like the ocean to expose any little micro inkling of like the illusion of control because you cannot control the ocean you can't overcome the Ocean the ocean's going

to kick your ass so you need to blend with her and receive her and honor her um yeah like that's where I I do my inner work out there okay your study go ahead do it well so it's not my study but this paper that I sent you I I think is really interesting um It's Paper published in the journal neuron very fine Journal excellent paper we'll post a link to it but um has many interesting features about it's really about the Study of surprise and the dopamine system but they use uh as the experimental

context um people watching a game of basketball and they observe that the the reset on um sort of the Interval Timer of is essentially said anytime there's been a reversal of which team has the ball so a drive down Court you know um uh by one team then the other team and you know if there's a you know rebound and then it switches Direction whatever might not switch Direction Ian basketball provides the the perfect Dynamic to study this while people are being um uh while there's some detection of brain activity going on and one of

I think the most interesting questions about this paper and implications are that just as we can set the aperture of our of our vision or the frame rate of our of how well we're clocking time how finally we're clocking time or how coely we're clocking time there's this big Question which is kind of a philosophical question really which is how do we segment time in our life earlier you mentioned that one of the major kind of uh timestamps if you will is a bad event like a oh like the things went completely differently than I

would have preferred them to it could be the death of another could be the death of a dream could be a a you know a setback a re whatever that it it marks Time and we just had these fires I mean La will be before and after the fires of 2025 yeah um you know I remember uh early in 2020 Kobe Bryant dying right so so these things I remember the Challenger explosion like negative events you know occupy a uh a certain place in our memory more easily than positive events but no one will forget

the birth of their first child or hopefully their second child too if they had a second child or their wedding day Right these things segment time you seem to be able to segment your life into a series of Pursuits where you cut ties with the practice of something like chess and you take what you learned and move it forward into to what seems to be a very different lifestyle and way of being I I think one of the major challenges for a lot of people it seems is how to thread the different elements of their

life forward in a way that feels um Contiguous and I think it's probably true that most people would prefer to not have loss major losses be necessary in order to segment their life in the most um fulfilling way uh so how do you think about the segmentation of time and maybe we'll run this backward from the scale of your lifetime we don't know how long you'll live but hopefully a long time let's assume by way of standard genetics somewhere in the neighborhood of between 90 and 110 if you take good care of yourself which you

seem to sounds good okay um and then let's compare that to how one structures a day that will allow us to bring us back to what you talked about before with this most important question Dynamic and focus and and and replenishing and dynamic between conscious and unconscious mind so when you think about your life you're 48 years old yeah okay I'm 49 so we're more or less the same uh Point uh Looking Backward anyway um our Liv is very different but same age roughly if you think you're going to live to be about a hundred

how are you thinking about your time frame are you thinking okay here's what I'm going to do for the next five years 10 I'll allow the whatever is happening in my life to to dictate what I do next I mean how are you running this analysis that's an awesome question I mean you so we have to we're basically Taking all the macro and all the micro and we're going to boil it down right here it's beautiful [Music] um that was a very expansive elegant question I think the true answer it's interesting there's I find this

distinction between how like when I think about a question like that between how I actually relate to the question and how I might deconstruct how I Actually rate to the question to make it relatable but is the deconstructed version actually true to how I really relate to the question right um because accurate deconstruction is so nuanced and difficult right so if I how I experientially relate to that question is that I'm living I want to live my life with just Relentless truth to myself with Authenticity with love with receptivity I want to deepen my my

connection to what I'm doing the Arts I'm practicing in specifically and in utiliz and and tapping into my relationship to the universe through the artistic exploration I have not planned out the next 10 20 40 50 60 years um I do have a long time Horizon on how I think about plans and developments and projects I'm working on Um but it's like this this Fusion of the cultivation of full presence right now and um and playing the long game but I don't I'm not clear on where the long game is going one of my dear

friends Boyd vardy you know Boyd I know of him and I'm a huge admirer of his work oh you should have him on he's awesome he's a beautiful or you should go to South South Africa and go connected oh sorry I didn't mean to yeah so he's an awesome I've been connected To him through Martha Beck a previous guest on this podcast and she spent a they're good friends they've spent a lot of times in L A lot of time in leli together and I'd love to get Boyd V vardy on here he's a beautiful

soul he's a he's a he's a real brother he's a kindred spirit like every once in a while you run into someone you're like um he in his his book lion tracker's Guide to Life he has this gorgeous quote um which is the words of a of a Master tracker reneas I have no idea where I'm going but I know exactly how to get there when I read those words I was just like they resonated very deeply in my soul I think those words are a really good I would take out the exactly I don't

know anything exactly so I don't know where I'm going but I have a really beautiful sense that I'm I'm tracking my way there you've got a process that seems to Work very well at least up until this point there's no reason to think it wouldn't work well especially given that you said not exactly leaving that openness to changes in our biology life events in in and for people around us I I have a big part of me and it's a strength and a weakness and I I I think a lot when I meet people I

think a lot about the entanglement of their Brilliance and their eccentricity or their genius and their dysfunction and When you're working with Peak performers you need to understand it and it's entanglement is often very very complex and people can think oh I can make this person more efficient by just removing this but that will be connected to their genius and you'll be like cutting some of it away right and so when you're working with like crazy brilliant anyone who's really a virtuoso is has some craziness built into what they're doing um and the entanglement of

their Brilliance and their dysfunction is is so complex and nuanced and one should be very careful to not do anything until one understands that entanglement with huge nuance and so the art of coaching people of that nature is like 99.9% listening observing not doing and one of the biggest mistakes that coaches make is doing doing too much because they need to show that they're valuable right and so I think a lot about like we need to really understand The nature of that entanglement and in me um that entanglement is complex and I have a profound

allergy to being untrue to myself why well I think a big part of the reason is that period when I was 15 16 17 18 years old that I described where I got pulled into this externalized thing from the film in the public scrutiny when I wasn't ready for it and being urged and not having the maturity to resist it because that's Ultimately on me to take on chest outside of my self- expression like what would kpov do here not what would Josh do here and I didn't have the understanding of learning karpov through Kasparov

right and so I I moved into like my first love was taken away from me or I allowed myself to have it taken away from me which is how i' would actually frame it and it was made static and stale and corrupted and externalized and there's so much existential Heartbreak in me about the loss of that first love that I'm I have the gift of being just allergic to being untrue to myself and so that's part of how I track through life is is I I if I don't love someone I don't work with them

no matter what the Temptation is if something feels untrue to me I don't do it now sometimes we have to sit in the unknowing for a while and something can Be can be off for a while right so like there's like there's Peaks and valleys of everything right or so in in the learning process right we can have long long plateaus like when I when I stopped playing chess I felt like I'd lost the love but I sat for two years with the question to be clear on whether I was in a plateau of the

love or if I'd lost the love and then I gained Clarity no no you you've lost the love and then I was done never played again never played a chess Game again um so that that factored in like I I have this um this it's so interesting how our like some of the like our our most powerful guiding principles or or voices in us they come from our deepest wounds right they absolutely do I mean I think it it's a because I think you know that this concept of energy is a is a complicated one

and there's no clear definition anyway but when I think about Energy I don't think about caloric energy I think of neural energy and I think about certain neural circuits like that um like if if you uh like I love the feeling of um excitement and tension that then is funneled into a specific activity that then yield some New Vista repeat you know it's just that's science and that's learning the day I realize that I'll never you know saturate all the knowledge that I could gather organize and disseminate through the Podcast I was like FPS like

that's just great because there's but I realize also that thing we can saturate ourselves internally we can drop Drive ourselves to the point of no replenishment we can you know get so narrow Focus that's why I think so much about aperture in time and space we can get so narrow focused that we we end up you know like a like a gopher that you know dug our way into a desert and then we're like uh or you're just far from Your family or far from home you know because you just dig dig dig dig dig

so you know I I think uh what is it you know like Eagle Vision you know um what I would I think that the DI the diving birds are probably the the ultimate in terms of having panoramic Vision do you know this they have a a horizon viewing density of cells so they can view the Horizon and they have a pupil to view the the fish so that they can dive and grab the fish despite the the refraction Of the of light under the water because the fish isn't actually we they see when people say

Eagle Vision uh versus you know like uh you know what's it what you know like Predator Vision up close or something like comant like they so they're they're like the diving birds those birds yeah yeah so they're they're they're flying and they're tracking The Horizon and they're also tracking things right below them simultaneously that to me is the ultimate state to try and Achieve in terms of space and time tracking that's a beautiful metaphor and they have to also adjust for right the refractory and if you've tried like archery from above water underwater which I

I used to paddle board while playing with a like while I spear fishing above water with a bow that refraction is hard to calculate yeah diving seabirds are the are the the ones that really just like they're the they're the ultimate I'm going to do a Study there I I I I want to learn about them okay great beautiful yeah I can send you some literature there love it the time unit of a day is is what most people can manage in their minds um maybe you could return to this like cycle of uh conscious

Focus um stimulus response and getting out of that you I love the example of going to take a piss because everyone does it um I do think too many people do it holding a phone yeah oh my god um can't Be good for a number of reasons um maybe just you walk us through that so um do you think it's let me ask a series of short question so when I wake up in the morning for instance like many people I'm not I don't feel immediately alert like I don't feel like I could just dive

into writing if writing is the most important thing I need to do that day or or I I have some transition time do you think that people should embrace natural Transition times on the time scale of a day or that they should train themselves to like you know bounce into effort like go with the flow or um or Force oneself through through the door well how I relate to that personally I've spent a lot of time thinking about day architecture well I call it I call day architecture and and um and there there's I think

there's some very systematic things we can do and I think but I think like anything They should be individualized right I don't think that everyone should follow a certain model because we're all very different one of you know that old book that Tim actually produced the audio book um daily rituals oh yeah like one of the best things about daily rituals is how few patterns there are through them it's just I love that book put a link to it such a good book so good I'm so glad that Tim Ferris is who we referring to

collected all these habits Of different writers and like some of them are so quirky and crazy and some are downright dangerous well he published the audio book of it right and I think I I think I told Tim he'll remind me I think I might have I think I told Tim about that book like many many years ago when he did the audio book and it's so good it's so good but and it just follows the daily routine it breaks Downs the daily routine it's like two to three to four page chapters on like 100

Some brilliant artists and scientists and creators and they're just so Random how they live some are out partying all night drugs alcohol caffeine others are super regimented and monkik it's the range of daily architectures is is so vast so I think we need to have like that awareness and that sense of humor and humility about it and we can get systematic and structured at the same time I think it's important to hold both of those I mean what you just asked I I Do believe that that that beautiful period when we first wake up and

that dream state is so powerful and I think that people almost almost all people immediately pick up their phone and start checking messages which just shuts down one's awareness of what's been happening beneath the surface all night so I think that that that's a real lost opportunity I remember year when I was 11 years old I read this my dad actually gave me this this Hemingway um essay on His creative process and there's a one of my favorite one of the most sometimes there's like an insanely potent book that's put together and it's two two

that come to mind are lessons of History which is the short compilation of Will and Ariel Durant um two of the greatest historians whove published tens of thousands of pages this is a short compilation of of a handful of thematic essays it's only like a 100 pages of of all their life's work boiled down to a Few themes it's unbelievably potent and Hemingway on writing is another book of that nature which takes all of Hemingways from from his from his books from his letters private letters from his articles and essays and notebooks like everything he's

written about the creative process and boils it into this like short book on his principles of creativity just unbelievable but before that book came out I read this piece this short thing he'd written about the Creative process which was essentially he'd always leave a sentence Unwritten he'd end his workday with a sentence like half written so leaving with a sense of direction and then he would let it go you know he would go out drinking he would do all the things that Hemingway did and then he would return to it first thing in the morning

and that like Unwritten sentence it would become a paragraph and a page in his mind and it would be a way to hit the Ground running and that's what really spurred me to start creating this process in my chess life of always ending my chess study with something left like posing my unconscious question like studying the complexity and then releasing it which later became and then tapping into it first thing in the morning pre- input which later became my miq process and then I developed team wide miq processes the teams that I work with all

have versions of the miq that They utilize as individuals but then as teams and it's an amazing way to develop a shared Consciousness in a team to have everybody be able to tap into the question that's top of mind for every member of their team or for a leader to be able to be aware of what is the most important question for every one of my scientists or my analysts or anything it's a really powerful way to cultivate shared Consciousness and it becomes our game tape because if we have an M if We're tracking our

miqs let's say I'm studying something for three weeks or for four weeks um and what do I think is Mo if I'm tracking the questions that I think are most critical for that thing and I'm deepening my analysis of it what I arrive at what I think in day one will be very different from the miq in day 14 and then we can study the gap and then we can set the patterns of the Gap the gaps and this is what I call miq Gap Analysis so if I'm setting a chess position like if I

play a chess game against you and it's incredibly complex um and I don't quite understand this position and then I do a deep deep analysis of it what I'll arrive at after 14 or 16 or 18 hours of study will be different from what I felt during the game now what's interesting is this is a cool thing about Chess study if we if my understanding was here during the chess game after like a few hours I might be Like really far away from that but after I've completed the study I'll usually be like very similar

but deeper so it's often like deeper like closer than where you were after a few hours of study but it's like a deeper level in but what's the gap between that and that between where I was in the game and what are the patterns in the gaps and then if you think about those patterns in the gaps through those lenses of the technical the thematic and the Psychological right we deconstruct it in that way then that becomes our game tape right one of the hardest things for mental athletes is to actually have game tape the

way basketball players do or foilers do or Fighters do where you can see the actual game tape we need to create our mental game tape so this is a way that I it both enhances the creative process and creates the game tape for the training process and then studying the the Gap analysis we do reveals what We need to to focus our deliberate practice on this um difference between physical Endeavors and cognitive Endeavors I think is so key nowadays most people are involved in cognitive Endeavors and there's so much um it's it's basically like being

in a glass house with with with Windows everywhere I mean social media texting um Windows uh internet connection on the computer there's just so many points of entry and um where one can become distracted Whereas if you paddle out to Ocean you know sure you could bring your phone perhaps but you're you're limited by um the the environment and the need for safety of the number of things that you can think about it's funny I I wore an Apple Watch training a little bit on the ocean and it and I it was good for me

cuz I wanted to like align my intuition on speed with what actually it was showing and it was good to calibrate myself but man it I took it off it's so Much better being on the ocean without technology yeah like being liberated from it tracking but yeah I'm learning to turn stuff off while I work um I mean I I've had to learn to just fight things back because when I started in science I mean I didn't have a SmartPhone I didn't any of that and um yeah one really has to fight nowadays for their

uh freedom from from these interruptions so it's something that people really have to cultivate um so in terms of the the Structure of that day you pose a question for the day the most important question would it be like let's say like I'm working on a revision of this book um that I delayed release on because I wanted to add a bunch of things to it so would one say you know the most important question is you know how do I finish this book today or is there I'm guessing it's more conceptual than that I

think that I think that you can I mean it's a tool that one can utilize Tactically or strategically right so it can be like if you're in Creative flow just leaving yourself with a sense of direction or it can actually be zooming out and thinking about like what is the highest order question that I that I should that that I'm grappling with right but I think it it's like one wants to stretch for the qu if one is doing the latter the higher order of strategic thinking it's like you can think of like One is

stretching for the question that matters most with the same kind of intellectual ual or cognitive intensity that one is experiencing for example pushing yourself from like 168 to 176 in cardiovascular interval training right like you're really stretching mentally so you need to be at your stretch Point growth comes at the point of resistance right so we like but intellectually we're not used to really feeling when we're at our stretch point so we're Thinking about a question but that's a question what's the higher order question what's the higher order question what's the question that really matters

and one way to frame it is like our mind if we're good at something slices like like a knife through butter through most most things but then there's a place we're stuck like those stuck points are are the miqs those stuck points are like right like we don't need to wait we don't need like B Will just get there like oh that's the thing and then we explore there like what how do that stretch within that stuck point and that's usually where people including myself pivot away I'm thinking outside of the work domain now like

like H like I don't want to think about like it's when we tend to I notice that um there's an infinite amount of uh distraction of available nowadays if we want it and you know audio books and podcasts and I think podcasts are Wonderful but you know they can be a source of distraction from the critical question we need to be asking or they can be a source of answers for perhaps the critical questions we're we're asking but there's just so there's so many of these opportunities to just look away from from something that is

like a it's like a emotional infection it's different than than an infection in your skin that just nagging because you can Feel it there and you want to get that thing out right very very Primal Instinct like get that thing out get the infection out this is like an emotional infection that you can just kind of not see if you CH choose to turn away but those are the things that really get you over time that's why we do our cold water training like that's where we like we we train at at living on the

other side of pain of enjoying it like that place that place that like itches like Bounce away from that but that's where you need to sit right right but we can practice that thematically like loving that discomfort wanting it hunting for it finding the place where we're stuck and then then letting it sit and then not bouncing away from it but just releasing it and then returning to it and we have insights right because often in those moments like where we have our insights are like when we wake up in the morning Are in those

stuck points and and I find this very interesting I'm sure you've done this like I I I've I've had I've done like hundreds of Diagnostics with people on my teams like where do they have most of their creative breakthroughs and so many of them are in the shower it's really interesting I think a big part of that is that like the full body somatic immersion moves them out of conscious thinking into like because their their mind is experiencing And then the release of the conscious mind allows the unconscious to to run and then they tap

into it first thing in the morning is when I get my insights or understanding or when the truth hits me Square in the face like there's no avoiding I wake up I think about like okay that's the thing I got to deal with and I tend to write it down right away try not write it down on my phone I think having a point of capture that doesn't offer any other dist ractions Dude that's why I'm a big believer in pen and paper I 100% agree with you and and like what's so first of all

I agree first thing in the morning that's the juice and the whole miq process is geared toward harnessing that like tapping into that right like feeding the because that just happened to me so many dozens of times where I would just have the Insight in the morning but then I realized I should be finding the areas of stuckness and feeding it to myself to Have the insight about so it's like it's like directing that creative process but then if we open up our phones like if the moment we start to see emails without reading them

or see anything we're unconsciously solving for what's in the emails yeah it's it's all stimulus response you're going into stim I if people can start to think about being reflective versus in stimulus response I think that's sort of like the widest binning of all this um I have to Say the shower I've talked about this thing about why people have insights in the shower with my friend I'd love to introduce you to him at some point we've been friends since we were 7 years old my friend Dr Eddie Chang he's a neurosurgeon and the chair

of neurosurgery at UCSF and he studies speech and language and he's taken people with locked in syndrome and developed AI algorithm so that they can speak through a screen with their face Moving in real time by decoding human speech for human uh Speech cortex and a truly brilliant individual he's been on this podcast he'll come back again ask him about the shower thing because he used to work on neuroplasticity of the auditory system we think we wonder if it's the kind of white noise of the shower as well yeah because uh Eddie's done beautiful work

showing that it's the signal to noise in the auditory system That defines whether or not a certain uh pattern of speech or or auditory cue gets remembered so when you have this in the background let's just put this in the terms that we've been referring to this up until now the thoughts that surface above that noise have a big sharp Peak relative to the background so it's the signal to noise whereas certainly the opposite would be when you're on your phone and you're scrolling through and you're looking at All the thoughts and feelings and and

stuff of other people so how do you capture your own thoughts in terms of which are and filter them through what's meaningful and what's not meaningful is a is I think a actually really important question to begin with and white noise background with very deprived you know visual stimulation most showers aren't that interesting it's white noise blank walls a few things that are familiar to you so They basically disappear from your visual field and the ideas that thoughts then can that are constantly geysering up through your unconscious mind can be captured because everything else is

noise perhaps this is a hypothesis and uh maybe I'll put you an Edy together sometime and just be an observer love that sounds that's powerful yeah so I mean that's how we learn language it's the error signals against the background noise it's all that's just how you fix Stutter it's a it's a you create background noise you increase noise to which actually elevates signal in the auditory system oddly um in any case so you found that 4 and a half half hours was The Sweet Spot of a focused work but for some people it might

be an hour they might need to train up that level of focus well and if it's four and a half hours it's not like that's like a lot the rest of the day is is feeding into like those being brilliant right so if It's four and a half hours of creative output time then there are other periods where one can do have inputs that feed it right I think it's very good for people to have an awareness of what their energy like what their peaks and valleys are of their energy throughout the day and then

align their Peak creativity work with their Peak energy periods think it's really important to not be in a constantly reactive State one of the things I find fascinating is How people will have meetings scheduled everywhere and then fit their thinking between meetings and how liberating it is for them when they actually know block out their time for Creative output time right it might be colorcoded in their calendar and then have meetings fit around there um so their day is driven by their self-expression as opposed to by a conens of reactivity and just more and more

and more and more right I think harnessing the undulation Of stress and Recovery throughout the day is hugely important I think having workouts throughout the day even micro workouts during the day meditation periods during the work day everything being quality over quantity right we can get so much more done if and and if you think about it like I mean you talk about like Elite performing competitive teams um it's all about like if you saw how much video analysis and time that the Boston Celtics coaching staff puts Into what ends up being like a 35

second clip that's shown to a player or the team like it's it's so much work to then the most potent thing right it's like when you're an elite because because like like the players are doing something so intense right like they it's all about quality not quantity they're not training basketball 17 hours a day they could not possibly play then or they're they're training brilliantly for like you know maybe an hour and a Half a day brilliantly but at like with scientifically right or if they're compete if they're playing for a two and a half

to three hour game right then what's the way to optimize for that you don't stack six hours of training in before three-hour game no so much of it is you know bodyw work and setting some tape and then being primed in the right way to remember what you're looking at on tape and then taking breaks and returning to it and then like Understanding exactly how much load is in your body and your mind and getting your sleep right and your nutrition right and getting everything optimized and then being a peak performer when it's on right

but we don't have that discipline as mental beings very often but we should in our creative process in our relationships right in the art of being a mom or a dad or a husband or a wife or a friend like why wouldn't we be cultivating ourselves and being Brilliant at that like I really believe in quality as a way of life that's another very important principle for me if we're either practicing sloppiness or practicing quality if we do something shitty then we're practicing shitty and that will just how like we can harness the like thematic

inter connectedness on the positive side we can also really harness it brilliantly on the negative side every time we practice being sloppiness we're using thematic Interconnectedness to be sloppy in everything I really believe that so quality is a way of life is a beautiful way to practice quality everywhere because it will manifest everywhere right not in a way that's like robotic or constrictive no in a way that's self-expressive and beautiful living one's life like a work of art yes beautiful amen let's do it well clearly you are uh I'm in the fight man you're in

the Fight and you're setting an incredible example um and you have your entire life which is uh remarkable and and so deeply appreciated I have to say and now I will reveal this that when I started this podcast I had a a short list of people that uh would be kind of like Pinch Me guest not because I want the guest to pinch me but like wow like I can't believe I'm sitting down with blank and uh you were on that list I've read the art of learning I've you Know I watched and read everything

I could about your your work and um I did see the the search for Bobby fiser with the understanding that that's accurate about certain things and probably inaccurate about others so if people choose to watch that they should keep that in mind it is Hollywood yep um more importantly um we've had this chance to sit down and do this and I I have to say I I uh I gained so much from your incredible Precision but also um scope Of observation in the world um because I'm not a basketball player I don't know how to

play chess and um uh and yet I've learned so much from you in your writings and your teachings and just the chance to sit down here and to learn from you I I know I'm speaking on behalf of myself and and literally millions of people I just want to say thank you for living your life like a work of art and for uh incorporating you know public Education which is what we're doing here uh into this set of Pursuits that you know you've been after one after the other after the other but that are bound

by this uh set of core themes so without getting too abstract I just want to say thank you so much for coming here for educating us for making us think I know it's going to change people's thoughts and behavior for the better and the only question left is to say uh would you please come back and talk to us again More absolutely man thank you for what you've just said it's it's an honor and I and i' I've learned so much from this this jam it feels like the beginning of a beautiful friendship so just

the beginning I feel the same way I look forward to thank you man thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Josh whiteskin to learn more about Josh's work and to find a link to his book The Art of learning which by the way I highly recommend Please see the show note captions if you're learning from Andor enjoying join this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us please also click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple

you can leave us up to a five-star review please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you Have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests that you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments and if you're not already following me on social media I am hubman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter Facebook

threads and Linkedin and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some Of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the hubman Lab podcast again that's hubman lab on all social media platforms for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30

years of research and Experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocol an operating manual for the human body and if you Haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter the neural network newsletter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that

includes everything from podcast summaries to what we call protocols in the form of brief 1 to three page PDFs that cover things like how to optimize your sleep how to regulate your dopamine we also have protocols related to deliberate cold exposure get a lot of questions about that deliberate heat exposure and on and On again all available at completely zero cost you simply go to hubman lab go to the menu tab in the top right corner scroll down to newsletter and enter your email and I should mention that we do not share your email with

anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Josh Whit skin and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]